MAGIC IN THE

ROMAN WORLD

This volume demonstrates that the word “magic” was widely
employed in late antique texts as part of polemical attacks on
enemies – but at the simplest level it was merely a term used for
other people’s rituals.

The study begins by analysing Jewish, Christian and Greco-

Roman uses of the term in the ﬁrst three centuries

. The author

then turns to a series of in-depth examples of “magical” practice –
exorcisms, love rites, alchemy and the transformation of humans
into divine beings – examining how such rituals were thought to
work. The book ends with an exploration of issues of gender and
magic, looking at the reasons behind the over-representation of
women on charges of using magic.

Janowitz’s lively and accessible work illuminates the fact that

activities denounced as magical were integral to late antique religious
practice, and shows that they must be understood from the perspec-
tive of those who employed them.

Naomi Janowitz is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the
University of California-Davis. She is the author of Poetics of Ascent
(1989) and numerous articles on the religions of late antiquity.

RELIGION IN THE FIRST

CHRISTIAN CENTURIES

Edited by Deborah Sawyer and John Sawyer,

Lancaster University

The aim of the books in this series is to survey particular themes
in the history of religion across the different religions of antiquity
and to set up comparisons and contrasts, resonances and discon-
tinuities, and thus reach a profounder understanding of the religious
experience in the ancient world.

Also available in this series:

WOMEN AND RELIGION IN THE FIRST

CHRISTIAN CENTURIES

Deborah F. Sawyer

THE CRUCIBLE OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY

J. Ian H. McDonald

SACRED LANGUAGES AND SACRED TEXTS

John Sawyer

DEATH, BURIAL AND REBIRTH IN THE

RELIGIONS OF ANTIQUITY

Jon Davies

TEACHERS AND TEXTS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD:

PHILOSOPHERS, JEWS AND CHRISTIANS

H. Gregory Snyder

HOLINESS: RABBINIC JUDAISM AND THE

GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD

Hannah K. Harrington

MAGIC IN THE

ROMAN WORLD

Pagans, Jews and Christians

Naomi Janowitz

London and New York

First published 2001

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,

or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including

photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or

retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Janowitz, Naomi

Magic in the Roman World; pagans, Jews, and Christians/Naomi Janowitz.

p. cm. – (Religion in the ﬁrst Christian centuries)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Magic, Ancient. 2. Rites and ceremonies–History. I. Title. II. Series.

BF1591.J36 2001

133.4309015–dc21

ISBN 0–415–20207–8 (pbk)

ISBN 0–415–20206–X (hbk)

ISBN 0-203-45764-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-76588-5 (Glassbook Format)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

For Rebecca

CONTENTS

Preface

List of abbreviations

Introduction

Greco-Roman, Christian and Jewish concepts
of “magic”

Pliny’s critique of the magi

The church fathers’ views of magic

Rabbinic classiﬁcation of magic

Daimons and angels and the world of exorcism

The rise of angelology and daimonology

Daimons, possession and exorcism

Ancient rites for gaining lovers

Using natural forces for divine goals: Maria the
Jewess and early alchemy

Divine power, human hands: becoming
gods in the ﬁrst centuries

The emergence of deiﬁcation techniques

Deiﬁcation techniques in early Christian texts

Ascent techniques routinized

vii

C O N T E N T S

viii

“Even the decent women practice witchcraft”:
magic and gender in late antiquity

Concluding note: the legacy of the ﬁrst centuries

Notes

101

Bibliography

117

Indexes

129

PREFACE

When I was asked to write a book on magic in the ﬁrst three
centuries I was not sure how to proceed, since, as the reader will
discover, this in my view is not a coherent topic. The result before
you, a short introduction to a bewildering topic, could be called
“The Artiﬁce of Magic.” It begins with a review of the workman-
ship that went into ancient notions of “magic,” and includes some
comments on modern artiﬁce as well. In the subsequent chapters I
ask the reader to explore a variety of once-maligned rituals without
using the word “magic.” Readers may wish to read the more
technical discussion of some of these rituals included in my book
Icons of Power: The Pragmatics of Late Antique Ritual, forthcoming
from Penn State Press.

Numerous teachers and students have helped me think over

ancient texts and modern methods, far too many to name. In
particular the students in my graduate seminar at Hebrew
University read and commented on various drafts and their
enthusiasm was critical to ﬁnishing the project.

Additional guidance came from the participants and audiences at

the symposium “Magic and Witchcraft in the Ancient, Medieval
and Renaissance Worlds” at the UCLA Center for the Study of
Women and at conferences in Israel organized by Moshe Idel,
Ithamar Gruenwald, Yuval Harrari and Michael Mach.

I want especially to thank John Sawyer, editor for the series The

First Christian Centuries, and Richard Stoneman at Routledge for
many good suggestions and for their patience. Technical questions
were answered by Tal Ilan, Brian Schmidt, and David Olster.
Editorial help came from Patricia Stuckey, Devorah Schoenfeld and
Andrew Lazarus. University of California Davis Research Grants
supported the work.

ABBREVIATIONS

Rabbinic

(m=Mishnah, j=Jerusalem Talmud,
b=Babylonian Talmud, t=tosefta

Avodah Zara

BabaB

Baba Batra

BabaK

Baba Kamma

Erub

Erubin

EsthRab

Esther Rabbah

GenRab

Genesis Rabbah

Git

Gittin

Hag

Hagigah

Hul

Hullin

Ket

Ketubot

Kid

Kiddushin

LamRab

Lamentations Rabbah

LevRab

Leviticus Rabbah

MegMeg

illa

Meil

Meila

Nid

Niddah

Pes

Pesachim

Pesiq Rab Kah

Pesiqta dRab Kahana

PesRab

Pesiqte Rabbati

Pirqe R El

Pirqe dRabbi Eleazar

Rosh Hashanah

Sanh

Sanhedrin

Shab

Shabbat

Shev

Shevuot

ShirRab

Songs of Songs Rabbah

Suc

Succah

Yeb

Yebamot

Greco-Roman Sources

AposCon

Apostolic Constitutions

Apuleius: deDeoSoc

On the god of Socrates

––: deDogmaPlat

On Platonic Doctrine

––: Meta

The Metamorphosis

––: Apol

Apology

Arian: Anab

Anabasis

Aristotle: NicEth

Nicomachean Ethics

Athenaeus: Deip

Learned Banquet/Deipnosophists

Augustine: Serm

Sermons

––: CivDei

City of God

Cicero: DeDiv

De Divinatione

––: DeRep

The Republic/De republica

––: Atticum

Letters to Atticus

––: ImpPomp

Speech for Pompey

––: InVat

About Vatinius

––: ProCluentio

In defense of Cluentius

CII

Frey Corpus Inscriptionum
Iudaicarum

CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

Clement of Alexandria: Paed

Teacher/Paedigogicus

––: Strom

Miscellanies/Stromateis

––: Protrep

Exhortation/Protrepticus

––: ExMar

Exhortation to Martyrdom

Ps-Clementine: Hom

Homilies

CodTheo

Codex Theodosianus

Columella: RR

On Agriculture

Damascius: VitIsid

Life of Isidore

Diodorus: Siculus Hist

History

Diogenes of Halicarnassus: AntiRom Roman Antiquities
Diogenes Laertius: Lives

Lives of the Philosophers

Eunapius: VitaPhil

Lives of the Philosophers

Euripides: Alc

Alcestis

Eusebius: PE

Preparation for the Gospels

Hesiod: Theog

Theogony

Hippocrates: SD

Sacred Diseases

Hippolytus: Ref

Refutations

Horace: Sat

Satires

Iamblichus: DeMyst

On the Mysteries

Inscriptiones Graecae

Irenaeus: AdHaer

Against Heresies

Josephus: BJ

Jewish War

––: Ant

Antiquities

John Chysostom: Jud

Against Judaizers

––: Hom

Homilies

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

––: inPs

Commentary on Psalms

Justin: Trypho

Dialogue with Trypho

––: 1Apol

First Apology

––: 2Apol

Second Apology

––: Orat

Oration

Lactanius: DivInst

Divine Institutions

Lucan: BelCiv

CivilWar

Lucian: Pseudoph

Lover of Lies

––: Scyth

Scythians

––: DeorConc

Congregation of the Gods

Marcus Aurelius: Med

Meditations

Marinus: VitaPro

Life of Proclus

Mig

On the Migration of Abraham

NHC

Nag Hammadi Corpus

Origen: CC

Contra Celsum

––: ComJn

Commentary on John

––: DePr

First Principles

––: ExMar

Exhortation to Martyrdom

––: ComMatt

Commentary on Matthew

Ovid: MedFac

Cosmetics

––: ArsAmat

The Art of Love

––: RemAm

Remedies of Love

PGM

Papyri Graecae Magicae (Greek Magical
Papyri)

Philo: Vita

Life of Moses

––: QuesEx

Questions on Exodus

––: SacAbel

Sacriﬁce of Abel

––: VitCon

On the Contemplative Life

––: LegAll

Allegorical Interpretation

––: De spec Leg

On the Special Laws

––: Quod omnis probus

Every Good Man

––: de Decal

On the Decalouge

Pindar: Olym

Olympian Odes

Plato: Crat

Cratylus

Pliny: NH

Natural History

Plotinus: Enn

Enneads

Plutarch: QuesCon

Table Talk

––: RomanQues

Roman Questions

––: DeDefectu

On the Obsolescence of Oracles

––: Cor

Coriolanus

––: OrDelphi

On the Delphic Oracles

Porphyry: deAbst

On Abstinence

Proclus: InTim

Commentary on the Timeaus

––: ThPl

Platonic Theology

––: InPlatRemp

Commentary on Republic

––: InCratyl

Commentary on Cratylus

SHR

Sepher Ha-Razim: The Book of Mysteries

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

xii

Seneca: HerOet

Hercules Oetaeus

Sophocles: Antig

Antigone

Statius: Theb

Thebais

Strabo: Geo

Geography

Suetonius: Vesp

Vespasian

Tacitus: Hist

Histories

Tatian: Disc

Discourse Against The Greeks

Tertullian: deAnima

On the Soul

––: DeSpec

On the Shows

––: CultFem

The Cult of Women

––: DeBapt

On Baptism

Virgil: Ecl

Eclogues

Additional Abbreviations

Ber

Berthelot and Ruelle 1963

Diels and Kranz 1956

Patrologia graeca

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

xiii

V E R S O R U N N I N G H E A D

xiv

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the human imagination, and especially about
hostile imagination. To call someone a “magician” during the ﬁrst
three centuries

was to mount a negative and potentially damag-

ing attack. In Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman sources the terms
we translate as “magic” and “magicians” were associated with human
sacriﬁces, perverse sexual practices and all sorts of antisocial and
misanthropic activities.

During the reign of Augustus, at the beginning of the time

period of our study, the poet Horace painted a particularly gruesome
picture of witches who perform not just human but child sacriﬁce
(Epodes 5).

The craven witches bury a young boy in the sand up to

his neck and tempt him with food until they ﬁnally cut out his
organs for use in a love potion. At the end of the fourth century, just
past the other limit for our study, Priscillian, bishop of Avila in
Spain, was charged with being a heretic and a magician. The bishops
who opposed him were able to have him executed, demonstrating
just how lethal these charges could be.

On closer inspection these charges, and the many made in the

intervening years, do not stand up to investigation. Despite Horace’s
vivid imagination, we have no evidence that bands of hags tortured
and then killed children. Priscillian was charged with having
nighttime meetings with women, praying naked and practicing
sorcery. All of these charges resulted from internal disputes about
church authority and conﬂicts among bishops about theology.

Jews,

as we will see, were often charged with being magicians in the
ancient world not because they really were such. The charges were
based on stereotypes over which Jews had no control and not, of
course, on some true connection Jews had with evil powers.

Charges of magic reveal social tensions, internecine battles, com-

petition for power, and fear that other people have special powers.

R E C T O R U N N I N G H E A D

Charges of witchcraft represented socially-acceptable modes of
attack against political enemies when other modes of asserting
rivalry were not an option. In the fourth century, for example, given
the political loyalty of those around the Emperor, “resentment and
anomalous power on the edge of the court could be isolated only by
the now intimate allegation – sorcery” (Brown 1972: 125). In these
attacks we see people trying, at best, to produce exciting literature,
or at worst, to eliminate enemies and opponents. We must not
confuse these attacks with sober presentations of fact; simply put,
when someone calls someone else a magician, we should not take
the charge at face value.

We can also track the ﬂip-side of these attacks, that is, the less

frequent cases where terms derived from the same root as “magic”
are associated with much more positive, but equally imaginative,
powers and knowledge. The “magi” were specialists in the very best
foreign wisdom according to some ancient sources. This wisdom
excelled all other since it was divine, available only from priests and
the most holy philosophers.

In order to formulate a successful investigation into ancient

“magic” we will have to set aside the habits and training of our own
imaginations. We bring many of our own modern expectations to a
study of “magic.” A quick ﬂip through the Yellow Pages reveals
that “magic” in its most common use today is largely a mode of
entertainment, an activity for children’s parties.

In this social

context, the skill of the magician is measured by his illusions, his
ability to make a dramatic and confounding act look real even
though the audience (or at least the adults who hired him) knows
that every act is fake. Coming from this benign view of magic, we
will be shocked to see that people are being put to death for
engaging in “magic” in the ﬁrst centuries

Another set of modern imaginings about “magic” is to embrace

the term as a means of playing with, and redirecting, the power
latent in the negative social images of witchcraft. Women in partic-
ular, recognizing the oppressive use of the term “witch” in past
history, claim for themselves the implicit power of the stereotype.
The popular bumper sticker “My other car is a broom” hints at an
alternate identity more mysterious and powerful than the normal
one. Alliance with covens is made in some circles today as a counter-
cultural move, a way of rejecting social norms.

These very modern moves are made independent of whether the

individuals persecuted and killed in the past would have embraced
the labels “witches” and “magician,” given a choice. Many of the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

people labeled “magicians” in the ﬁrst three centuries were simply
practicing traditional forms of their religious practice. Since they
were often pagans much of what people claim as “ancient magic” is
modern imaginings of ancient Greco-Roman religion. The ancient
practitioners would be horriﬁed to be lumped together with
“witches” and “warlocks” (though they might be happy to see the
current interest in their ancient practices). They too believed that
certain other practices were witchcraft and condemned the practi-
tioners as magicians.

Many of these modern imaginings are far from the notions of

magic in the ﬁrst centuries. As we will see in Chapter 1, labeling
people “magicians” was a way of marginalizing them, casting doubt
on their practices and beliefs. “Magic” was not bad because it was
fraudulent, though that possibility was raised at a few points in
ancient discussions. In the main magic was dangerous because it
worked. In the eyes of our ancient sources magic produced real
results. It did so, however, by means of evil powers. Thus its social
place was with other real and imagined practices that were thought
to threaten the social fabric, such as human sacriﬁce and cannibalism.
On a more intimate scale magic threatened one’s family and
prosperity.

Since the term carried with it so much opprobrium, it was rarely

used as a term of self-deﬁnition.

Moses and Jesus were both con-

sidered magicians by outsiders, much to the horror of Jews and
Christians. Any ritual action could be labeled “magic” from the
Jewish use of phylacteries to Greco-Roman prayer ceremonies and
the Christian Eucharist. Entire religions were deﬁned as “magic,”
and the consequences linger today, especially in the case of modern
attitudes towards Greco-Roman and Egyptian religious practices.

No doubt some ancients were skeptical of any and all attempts to

employ supernatural powers, but their writings are not the focus of
this study. Even the rituals such as alchemy, sometimes considered
to be proto-science, attempted to transform earthly metals into
divine substances.

This study will not address the limitations of modern scholarly

deﬁnitions of magic, though at a few points some of the lingering
inﬂuence of these deﬁnitions will be noted. The origins and short-
comings of late nineteenth to early twentieth century deﬁnitions of
magic have already been discussed at length. Voluminous articles
and books have been written on this topic and anyone interested in
it can ﬁnd many cogent discussions.

In briefest outline, the

inﬂuential early twentieth-century formulations of “magic” such as

I N T R O D U C T I O N

James Frazer’s in The Golden Bough were based on Victorian notions
of evolution. “Magic,” found primarily in non-Christian religions,
was an evolutionary precursor to “religion.” The primitive practices
were based on ﬂawed modes of thought Frazer formulated as the
Laws of Contagion and Like-Attracts-Like.

Evidence of these laws

included an enormous mix of rituals drawn from, as they were called
then, “savage” cultures. Due to his anti-Catholic attitude, Frazer
also included as magic a few European peasant practices.

All these exemplary rituals were taken out of their theological

and social contexts. This was key to building a synthetic picture of
“magic.” Since the theological explanations were missing, the prac-
tices looked nonsensical and silly. They were then contrasted to
other more familiar religious practices of Protestant Christians.
These latter practices either were presumed to have complex
theological and philosophical foundations or were left without
scrutiny as to their modes of perceived efﬁcacy (why people thought
they might work).

The shortcomings of this method of analysis have been recognized

and articulated at length.

In addition to its misguided evolutionary

assumptions, it draws deeply on the individual prejudices of the
scholar and his or her imaginings about what modes of ritual action
are inappropriate or simply aesthetically unappealing. Ultimately
Frazer’s discussion did not establish a coherent category of magical
rituals distinct from religious ones, based on either the methods
employed or the goals sought. The quintessential magical method,
using a voodoo doll, is indistinguishable from methods used in
religious rituals; at the same time, the goals of magic – improving
health, destroying enemies – are now recognized as part and parcel
of religious practices.

With the demise of twentieth century deﬁnitions of magic, many

rituals which were classiﬁed as magic only a few decades ago have
made their way back into the more acceptable category religion. A
bellwether of these modiﬁcations, chosen somewhat randomly from
among hundreds, is the work of Judah Goldin on Honi the Circle-
Drawer. Honi appears in several rabbinic texts, each with a some-
what differing recounting of his exploits. His most famous exploit
was drawing a circle on the ground and refusing to come out until
the deity sent rain.

In Goldin’s 1963 article the story of Honi the

Circle-Drawer is presented as a clear example of magic, following its
classiﬁcation as magic by Ludwig Blau in 1914.

Inﬂuenced no doubt by the ongoing debates about deﬁnitions of

magic, in a subsequent article in 1976 Goldin no longer described

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Honi as a magician. Instead he noted that Honi was not declared to
be a magician in any of the sources. The ancient texts refer to him as
one of the “men of deed,” a category of practitioners who were at
odds with rabbis. From the rabbinic point of view “Honi’s behavior
is in fact regarded by his critics as an example of arrogance towards
Heaven” (1976). The rabbis’ mixed view of Honi is no doubt based in
part on their competition with characters of his type.

Honi’s ritual is

not “magic” from either a rabbinic or a scholarly view, though it is
clearly behavior about which the rabbis had mixed feelings.

Despite its increasingly contested status, “magic” lingers on as a

substantive category in scholarly discourse. Hesitant to abandon
altogether the word “magic” as a scholarly category, some scholars
have called for a “common sense” deﬁnition. Others try to shore up
Frazer’s tottering schema and ﬁnd some more systematic distinction
between magic and religion. Almost across the board we ﬁnd
increasingly narrow deﬁnitions of magic, which one by one
eliminate elements found in, for example, Blau’s classic 1914 study
of Jewish magic. The few items remaining in the category “magic”
include an odd collection of the recitation of nonsense syllables,
certain verbal formulas (commands), some negative behaviors such
as cursing and the use of material objects in rites. Several of these
are encountered in the texts discussed in Chapter 3; modern deﬁni-
tions of magic will brieﬂy be commented on there. Sometimes what
passes for analysis of Jewish magic is simply the modern repetition
of ancient rabbinic prejudices against practices that they could not
control.

The label “magic,” in short, was too closely intertwined with

polemics in the ancient world to easily, or even with a great deal of
contortion, fall into a neat scholarly category.

The emerging

consensus that deﬁning magic is as problematic as deﬁning vulgar-
ity or deviance (Garrett 1989) forces us to rethink what should be
covered in a book about “magic.” One avenue would be to limit our
analysis to cases where the rituals are not labeled as magic by
someone else, but where the term appears to be a mode of self-
classiﬁcation. If we limit this book to rituals which were labeled as
“magic” by the practitioners who enacted them, we would have a
very short book. Any investigation of imagination is not an easy
task and the ancient rhetorical uses of the term do not deﬁne an
obvious subject matter for a book on “magic.”

Our ﬁrst task then, covered in Chapter 1, is to look more closely

at the usages of the term “magic” in the ﬁrst three centuries. The
Greek term mageia comes from the term for a Persian priest (magos).

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The term received a mostly negative valence due to the ambivalent,
but generally hostile, attitude of Greco-Roman writers to their
famous neighbors. As a placeholder for hostile imaginings, the term
“magician” was juxtaposed from the ﬁfth century

BCE

on with a

range of suspicious practices such as divination and healing.
Employed in the legal codes as a charge warranting capital punish-
ment, mageia solidiﬁed into a term of abuse. Use by Jews, Christians
and Greco-Roman writers was highly rhetorical, and pointed to the
complex social textures of inter- and intra-group hostilities.

After the survey of ancient usages in Chapter 1, we will consider

a variety of ritual practices from ﬁrst three centuries

. Each of our

examples draws on data from Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman
religions. Each illustrates some aspect of the late antique artiﬁce of
employing supernatural powers. Each case will give us some insight
into the construction of rituals, viewed as sanctioned by some and as
illicit magic by others.

As we do so, we will move from the realm of hostile imaginings

to the reverse of such attacks: how the practitioners themselves
imagined their rituals to work. Here we will see individuals putting
to work a variety of notions about effective words and deeds.

Given the problems with dating ritual texts, we will occasionally

look at material preserved in texts that date from later centuries.
This is especially true in the case of Jewish texts, where we will
frequently turn to rabbinic texts edited much past the ﬁrst three
centuries. In these cases parallel texts from other religious traditions
which are easier to date supply important evidence that the later
rabbinic texts preserved ideas from earlier centuries.

The ﬁrst example, discussed in Chapter 2, is exorcism, and in

particular, exorcism as a method of healing. These dramatic contests
lead us to the issue of daimons, the supernatural forces that could
inhabit a human body. Even a brief review of the role of daimons
and their place within the ancient cosmology disabuses us of
modern stereotypes of monotheism. Central to the construction of
these rituals is a rich, and inherently obscure, imagining of diverse
types of supernatural forces. The chapter then turns to some speciﬁc
examples of how human practitioners attempted to gain control
over the daimons. Human suffering in the form of illness was a
palpable monument to the belief that daimons could move into
human homes. Curing the afﬂicted person was a supernatural battle
that momentarily revealed the workings of a usually unseen world.

Chapter 3 turns to love-rites and the Greek and Hebrew hand-

books in which they appear. Both handbooks present their rituals as

I N T R O D U C T I O N

a particular type of activity, one which includes the recitation of
complicated verbal formulas and the use of numerous types of
material objects. The handbooks include a wide variety of goals,
some of which are mundane, if not downright silly. Why bother to
employ supernatural power to, for example, ﬁll up a room with
smoke and thereby impress people, as found in the Hebrew Book of
Secrets? If some rituals look suspicious due to their evil intentions,
others look beneath the dignity of religious concerns. Yet the
ancient texts belie these divisions and include all of these concerns
together. Here again we need to consider how this wide range of
rituals was thought to work. Central to this chapter is the use of
material objects and their role in the perceived efﬁcacy of the
rituals.

The next chapter, Chapter 4, turns to alchemy or the “Sacred

Art,” as it was called in the ﬁrst centuries. Early alchemical tradi-
tions present a complex case of classiﬁcation for both ancients and
moderns. The goals of these rites look extremely suspicious both to
those who do not believe this type of transformation is possible and
to those who do not want people to have such power. At the same
time, the philosophical underpinnings of some of the rites, and the
technical appearance of the rituals, have led many to classify the
rites as somehow closer instead to science. This chapter will try to
give an idea of how the ancient practitioners thought their rituals
worked and how notions of natural forces in turn helped shape the
contours of deﬁnitions of magic.

The next set of rituals in Chapter 5 attempts to turn humans into

divine beings by conferring immortality on them. The striking,
even seemingly heretical, nature of these rituals calls our attention
to them. The classic picture of magic centers on the powerful ﬁgure
of the magician. Rituals that turn humans into divine ﬁgures might
be the best place to locate “magicians.” However, these rituals place
the transformed individual not outside of the bound of religious
expression but as the prime representative of the highest religious
strivings. What is most striking, perhaps, is the incredible range of
rituals which were understood to have this goal and potential. The
rites have a distinct aesthetic sense which challenges both the
modern division between magic and religion and modern notions of
monotheism.

The ﬁnal chapter, Chapter 6, focuses directly on the issue of

gender. Historically, men have done much of the imagining of magic,
thus many of the people accused of perverse practices have been
women. We will look at this general question from the late antique

I N T R O D U C T I O N

perspective and see how and why women were associated so closely
with “magic.” Our test case is rabbinic discussions of female witches,
chosen because they offer us both extensive and highly theoretical
presentations of the issues.

The intriguing question of why people believe these ideas and

rituals will not be addressed in this study, but two preliminary
points on this topic deserve attention. First, in order to begin
thinking about why people might believe in notions of cause and
effect different from ours we must start with a careful examination
of the speciﬁc historical context. It is the premise of this study,
learned from recent anthropological theories, that notions of cause
and effect are culturally based. This is not a claim of radical
relativism; some of the basic principals of logic may turn out to be
cross-culturally true. Most of the time, however, people are not
using strictly logical modes of thought. This leaves us plenty of
room for cultural and historical variation in modes of thought about
cause and effect.

Second, at quite a different level, partial answers to this question

may come from the world of psychology and thus are beyond the
scope of this study. It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause
and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary
is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating
based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly
awarded.

People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it,

even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears
practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be
inﬂuenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true
even if these experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity.
The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical
failures but when they begin to do something else.

Despite our desire to see ourselves as direct heirs of late antique

beliefs, we must develop a sense of being visitors to this world. And
most of all we must be willing to look at rituals which might seem
familiar with new eyes lest we too easily join the polemical wars of
the ancient world. While we begin looking at “magic” what may
change for us is our notion of the contours of the human imagination.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

GRECO-ROMAN,

CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH

CONCEPTS OF “MAGIC”

The origin of our term “magic” is ﬁlled with irony and imagination.
The Greek term mageia [Latin: magia] derives from the Persian term
magos: “priest.”

This hereditary priesthood from what is now

Western Iran ofﬁciated at the ancient ﬁre sacriﬁces. Herodotus,
whose vision was adopted by so many later Greeks, painted a vivid
picture for the Greeks of the foreign priests chanting stories of the
birth of the gods at the sacriﬁces (Hist. 1.132, cf. 7.43).

By the ﬁrst centuries of the Common Era the term mageia already

had a long history of use in Greek literature. The earliest Greek
writer to describe the priests appears to be Xanthus in the early ﬁfth
century (Diogenes Laertes, Lives 1.2). He wrote an entire treatise
about the foreign priests, thereby making some doctrines of ancient
Persian religion available to the Greek audience.

Greek uses of the term after Xanthus had negative, or at best

mixed, connotations.

Religious terms often accrue negative connot-

ations in another culture, as in the cases of voodoo or fakir.

Persians

were not only foreigners but also military enemies. Magi accom-
panied Xerxes in his famed crossing of the Hellespont (Kingsley
1995: 189). In Greco-Roman usage the picture of the magos and his
mageia deviated from the original meaning, until, as we will see, it
became an umbrella term for any and all suspect uses of super-
natural powers.

A variety of Greek literary texts associated the magos and his work

of mageia with all sorts of questionable ﬁgures including beggars
and wizards.

Inexplicable behavior, such as Helen leaving her

husband for the Trojan Paris, was attributed to the mysterious
power of these individuals (Euripides, Orestes 1497). The rhetorician
Gorgias equated the practices of the magoi with goetia, an older
Greek term for illicit and malevolent practices with even worse
connotations (DK 82 B 11 p. 291).

R E C T O R U N N I N G H E A D

Even as mageia came generally to denote suspicious and barbaric

practices, it continued to be used in more charitable ways in some
circles.

The term still had positive connotations, harkening back to

the magi and mageia as special and powerful esoteric practitioners and
practices which were foreign but not illicit or wrong. According to
the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Alcibiades the magi were in charge of
the “worship of the gods” (1.122A). Cicero introduced the term to
his ﬁrst century

BCE

Latin readers as “augurs and diviners among the

Persians,” roles familiar to Roman readers (deDiv 1.41.90–1). In the
ﬁrst century

Dio Chrysostom referred to the magi as those who

specialize in the worship of the divine (Oration 36.4).

In the mid-second century

, the writer Apuleius, charged by

hostile relatives with luring his rich wife via magic, was able as part
of a biting and often sarcastic defense to point to the positive
meanings of magos. In his Apology, delivered in North Africa in
158/9 he stated,

For if, as I read in many authors, a magician means in the
language of the Persians, the same thing that the word “priest”
does, I put, what is the crime, pray, in being a magician?
What is the crime in properly knowing, and understanding,
and being versed in the laws of ceremonials, the solemn order
of sacred rites, and religious ordinances?

(Apology 25.26)

Much later the neo-platonic philosopher Proclus (b. 410)
called upon the practices of the magi as support for his positive
attitude toward prayer (inTim 1. p. 208). Clearly he thought that his
readers would recognize his reference to the ancient priests. In
Jewish circles, positive descriptions of the magi include Philo’s
description of their attempts to learn the truth (Quod omnis probus
74).

These were minority positions, however, and the negative usages

were much more common. Thus Augustine had to explain the
suspicious appearance of “magi” in the New Testament; he com-
mented that they were common magicians who had been converted
by grace (Sermons 20.3–4).

Use of the term in Roman legal rulings was decidedly negative.

These usages are ﬁrst documented, as best as we can tell, with the
Sententiae of the jurist Iulius Paulus.

The history of this comment-

ary to earlier law codes is obscure, but it was probably edited in the
early third century

using older materials.

C O N C E P T S O F

“

M A G I C

”

In the hands of the Roman lawmakers the previous negative

associations of the term were solidiﬁed. The practice of mageia
became a capital offense.

Thus the code states “that it be decided

that persons who are addicted to the art of magic shall suffer
extreme punishment. Magicians themselves shall be burned alive”
(Sent V. 23.17).

Exactly which acts were proscribed varied from code to code and

from emperor to emperor, depending most probably on which acts
were thought to be most threatening at a particular point in time.

Caracalla, and later Constantius II, had very broad conceptions
which included, for example, the use of amulets to ward off disease.
Under Constantine the Great, the venerable institution of reading
auguries for the purpose of divination came under attack. Any
diviner who was charged with operating in a private house, instead
of as part of the standard public rites, was liable to be burned
alive.

Given the social role of law codes, the use of the term in these

codes seems to construct an objective deﬁnition of what magic really
is. It is a mistake, however, to take these Roman uses and go back
(or forward) in history looking for “magic.” Prior to this time,
suspect practices were proscribed on a case-by-case basis that did
not necessarily reﬂect the later Roman notions of magic. For example,
the Twelve Tables, originally composed in the mid-ﬁfth century

BCE

, ordered punishment for the person “who sang evil songs”

malum carmen incantare, and who tried to steal harvests via incant-
ations.

The Latin phrasing for both injunctions is ambiguous.

Ancient interpreters understood the “evil songs” to be a form of
slander; modern interpreters are more likely to label it ancient
“magic.”

These injunctions were not made in reference to any

abstract notion of magic, at least as far as the citations we have from
the Twelve Tables. Their inclusion was based on the fact that the
practices led to personal injury.

Plato also argued for punishing instances of harm done against

individuals without any reference to an overarching category of
“magic.”

Plato’s discussion is particularly subtle and it distorts

his complex classiﬁcation to simply say that Plato was legislating
against “magic.” When someone was harmed, the ﬁrst question
that had to be asked, according to Plato, was the social role of the
person who harmed him (Laws 933C–E). A doctor could be
punished for harming an individual while the actions of a private
person carried fewer social consequences. Again this usage is
distinct from later Roman ones.

C O N C E P T S O F

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M A G I C

”

In the ﬁrst century

BCE

Sulla’s Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneﬁcis

constructed a special class of outlawed political plotters and
poisoners. Veneﬁcium were potions that were thought, among other
things, to heal or to cause people to fall in love. Sometimes they
were lethal.

Again the ruling is speciﬁc and no general category is

referred to. In fact, references to veneﬁcium throughout Roman liter-
ature, and to

F£rmakon

in Greek literature, are always ambiguous.

The potions were powerful; whether that power was for good or for
evil depended on the outcome of each speciﬁc case.

The appearance of the term “magic” in law codes gives us a series

of snapshots of abstract social usage, but does not begin to demar-
cate the social employment of the term in attacks and counter-
attacks. Who was charged with these offences, and who was, beyond
that, convicted and punished, depends on issues at which the code
does not even hint. In addition, the fact that any event (or non-
event) could be explained as due to magic meant that tremendous
weight was always thrown on rhetorical arguments even when used
in legal settings.

We see this in Apuleius’ lively defense against the legal charge

that he was a magos and that he had seduced his wife via magic.

Despite attempts in the law codes to delineate a clear set of for-
bidden activities, the speciﬁc components in the charge of magic
made against him included actions as diverse as collecting ﬁsh,
owning a mirror, writing poetry, and having a suspiciously small
number of servants. “Magic” refused to stay within a neat set of
legal deﬁnitions.

Apuleius readily pointed out that no one action with which he

was charged inherently constitutes magic: is everyone who collects
ﬁsh a magician? Many of the activities which look like magic, he
argued, are in fact the daily pursuits of philosophers and those who
investigate the natural world. Seen from this angle, the practices
appear innocent, or even praiseworthy. Equally important to
Apuleius was a general strategy of ridiculing his opponents. He
attempted to put them on the defensive by casting doubt on their
characters and motives and thereby to impugn the entire case.

Not everyone was equally likely to be charged as a magician. In

addition to the magi, several other groups were particularly closely
associated with magic. Hebrews and Jews were thought to have
access to ancient secrets, sometimes understood to be helpful
wisdom and sometimes viewed more negatively as forbidden and
perverse magical practices.

Egypt was often cited as the source of

magic by other cultures. A writing system which pre-dated the

C O N C E P T S O F

“

M A G I C

”

Greeks and the enormous ancient monuments impressed Herodotus
and thereby all Greeks. Hieroglyphs, mummiﬁcation, elaborate
priesthoods – all these made Egypt a convenient source for strange
and perverse knowledge. Already in the text of Isaiah, Egypt was
posited as the source of necromancy rituals by the deuteronomic
redactor (Schmidt 1994: 188). This trope reappears in rabbinic liter-
ature in the saying that nine tenths of magic was given to Egypt
(Avot R Nat 48). For Origen the main contemporary practitioners of
magic were located in Egypt (CC 1.22, 28, 38, 68).

Thrace was considered to be the home of many magicians, as was

Thessaly, which was notorious for its witches.

The Marsi were

known as “snake-charmers” with special cures for snakebites, a
cliché from Ovid (MedFac 39) to Augustine (Epist 55.12; Gen ad
litt 21.28, 29). All of these stereotypes ﬂourished in the ﬁrst three
centuries

and some continue to thrive today.

Pliny’s critique of the magi

In the second half of the ﬁrst century

, Pliny composed his

magisterial Natural History, a compendium of information about the
natural world. This extended survey compiles a hodgepodge of
information about plant and animal products including their uses in
curing diseases. Pliny tantalizes us by offering to “expose” the
“fraudulent lies of the magi” whose “art has held complete sway
throughout the world for many ages” (NH 30.1). Modern readers,
eager to prove that educated Romans rejected “magic,” have often
pointed to Pliny’s rejection of the magi. His compendium, they
argue, approaches the world through careful empirical observation
rather than through magic. Pliny’s dismissal of magical cures looks
deceptively modern at ﬁrst glance and appears to set him up as a
reasoned critic of magical practices.

Pliny, however, includes cures modern readers would never dream

of employing. His conception of magic is inconsistent and highly
rhetorical, permitting him to both include and exclude practices at
will. On closer analysis we see that he does not use a coherent set of
criteria for evaluating the ideas of the magi, or anyone else’s cures
for that matter. His deﬁnition of magic cannot be ours.

The magi’s success is due, Pliny warned, to their ability to make

a combination of medicine, religion and astrology that is irresistible
to most people (NH 30.2). Many famous thinkers were drawn to this
philosophy and treasured the magi’s secrets, including Pythagoras,
Empedocles, Democritus and even Plato (NH 30.9). Pliny was

C O N C E P T S O F

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M A G I C

”

bewildered that Homer did not refer to the magi and their arts,
since characters in Homer’s poems practice arts which look to him
like those of the magi (NH 30.5–6).

When it comes to explaining in more detail the particular reasons

for rejecting the cures of the magi, Pliny’s overall criteria are never
clearly stated. Sometimes the denunciations are very speciﬁc. For
example, he denounced cures of the magi for relying on “that very
loathsome animal the tick (NH 30.82)” and on moles, animals
which he thinks are “cursed by nature.” Yet he can also state with
conﬁdence “I ﬁnd that a heavy cold clears up if the sufferer kisses a
mule’s muzzle (NH 30.31).”

Elsewhere Pliny castigated the magi for collecting nail parings

and putting them on people’s doorposts, yet putting the same
parings in amulets he deemed useful (NH 28.86). The reason why
he rejected putting them on people’s doorposts is that he worries
that this practice might spread a disease. The mechanism for this
contagion is unclear. The critique appears to be ad hoc: fear of
spreading disease, for whatever reason, does not re-appear often in
his writings.

The only consistent criterion that Pliny used is that he rejected

the notion, which he attributed to the magi, of collecting medicinal
materials based on the phases of the moon and other astrological
considerations (NH 28.95). He held to this position consistently,
rejecting cures with astrological components even when they are not
associated with the magi (NH 30.96). The idea of correlating
earthly cures found in nature with the movement of the moon and
stars appears to be too complicated for Pliny. He did not completely
discount these cures, rejecting only the method of gathering the
materials. He accepted, for example, the view of the magi about the
power of hyena skin, but rejected their claim that the hyenas must
be hunted during a particular phase of the moon (NH 28.94).

Pliny also rejected cures which seemed overly elaborate to him.

In one revealing instance he criticized a cure simply because it
required ﬁfty-four different ingredients. The sheer complexity of the
recipes seemed to make it suspicious (NH 29.24–5).

The denunciations of the magi, rather than being a clear critique

of “magic,” were part of Pliny’s strategy to bolster the reputation of
his own research. Pliny tried to set apart some cures as more reliable
than others. He reinforced the quality of approved cures by dotting
his work with references to authorities who successfully cured speciﬁc
people by the procedures he compiled. Midway in his report about
cures that employ bird organs he recounted that the Aspenates

C O N C E P T S O F

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M A G I C

”

brothers, from a consular family, were cured of colic. He was able
not only to name the individuals, but also give the speciﬁcs of the
cures: one brother wore an amulet made from a lark and the other
offered up a bird-derived sacriﬁce at a brick oven (NH 30.20).

These very speciﬁc authorities and cures contrast with references

to fraudulent authorities such as the “magi” and “doctors.” The
latter he denounced with fervor and quite a lot of wit (NH
29.1–28). Doctors, for example, are “the only people who can
commit homicide with impunity” (NH 29.18). Their practices are
based on whim as they “change their minds a thousand times” (NH
19.23). Their main concern is to collect huge fees for themselves.

Pliny did not, however, reject all cures used by doctors. His model

was Cato, who denounced doctors, all the while keeping his own
book of cures which he employed for the beneﬁt of his family and
slaves (NH 29.14–16).

Since Pliny had few other means of establishing the reasonability

of his mode of work, lacking anything like clinical trials or testing
of speciﬁc ingredients, he had to set up the straw men of greedy
doctors and astrological magi. The impressive speciﬁcity of Pliny’s
knowledge about good cures is contrasted with speciﬁc failures of
the magi and the doctors. Pliny could point to a Roman nobleman
who wore a special egg recommended by the magi and was killed
by the emperor precisely because it was discovered (NH 29.52–4).

Pliny stressed that he did not undertake his compendium for

personal gain (unlike the doctors) and that he had judiciously
weeded out, or signaled to the reader, the more outlandish cures
(unlike the magi). These rhetorical claims do not make Pliny’s
collection a forerunner of modern empirical science and medicine.
Rejecting the collection of materials based on the phases of the moon
as well as concoctions which have more than ﬁfty-four ingredients
does not make his guidebook rational.

In the end Pliny’s theory of efﬁcacy for the cures he favored was

the same one employed by other people in cures he rejected: the
concepts of discordia [antipathy] and concordia [sympathy]. These
terms were widely used in the ﬁrst three centuries

to refer to a

general belief in multiple interconnections between disparate
parts of the natural world.

Pliny offered examples such as “the

magnetic stone draws iron to itself while another kind repels it,
the diamond, unbreakable by any other force is broken by goat’s
blood” (NH 20.2). Sympathy and antipathy are natural forces
to him. From these ideas, Pliny states, “medicine” was born
(NH 24.4).

C O N C E P T S O F

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M A G I C

”

When we look at the speciﬁcs of his cures it is often hard to see

these principles systematically applied. Any one item, such as the
bark of a tree, or an organ from an animal, could be used for a
bewildering variety of physical complaints. For anyone who does
not accept the existence of such forces, as in the case of much
modern analysis, they are characterized as magic.

Pliny did not even hint at a distinction between magical and

religious cures; this distinction carries no valence for him. Here
Pliny is similar to the early Greek medical writers, who also sweep
the magi into a larger category of fraudulent practitioners, all of
whom they oppose. Hippocrates, for example, in his On the Sacred
Disease, denounced the magi together with “puriﬁers, charlatans and
humbugs” (SD 2). None of these ﬁgures had any good explanations
for disease.

Hippocrates distinguished these practitioners from those who

bring “prayers and sacriﬁces.” This general reference offers a simpli-
ﬁed and idealized contrast for the “humbugs.” It makes no attempt
to explain what the role of the prayers and sacriﬁces are in relation
to the cures advocated by the Hippocratic writers. Some of the
ﬁgures denounced would probably be described in modern terms as
“religious” practitioners. All of these ﬁgures, according to Hippo-
crates, do not understand the origin of illness and thus their
attempts to cure people are destined to fail.

Pliny had no need of a more reﬁned (or more consistent) deﬁn-

ition. His magi no longer ofﬁciated at ﬁre sacriﬁces, but instead are
connected with a welter of healing practices. Constructing a path
between the doctor and the magi, Pliny sought a course that looked
reasonable and judicious. Western attacks on Chinese medicine
might offer us a modern parallel. These practices often lack the
institutional basis other forms of medicine have in the West and
represent a threatening foreign wisdom. This analogy reminds us
that there is nothing inherently “magical” about the healing
practices of the magi, and we have no idea if they were any more or
less successful than those Pliny advocated.

The church fathers’ views of magic

In religious debates during the ﬁrst three centuries charges of magic
were used in numerous ways to draw distinctions between insiders
and outsiders, and between proper and improper practices and
beliefs. At the simplest level “magic” was the term used for other
people’s religious rituals (Neusner 1989). Christian and Greco-

C O N C E P T S O F

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M A G I C

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Roman writers denounced as magic Jewish practices of fasting, food
restrictions and Sabbath observance.

Jews in turn denounced Jesus

as a magician, though the subsequent censorship of rabbinic texts
often disguised the stories so that the references to Jesus must be
reconstructed.

Jews and Christians condemned “pagan” rituals

as magic. As one example among many, for Justin his turn to
Christianity was a turn away from magic (1Apol. 14).

No doubt

Greco-Roman writers engaged at points in similar polemics.

It would be a mistake to leave the discussion at the level of these

isolated comments. Out of context, these comments loom large and
are likely to lead us to see them as representations of general
patterns of group interactions. Not every equation of a practice with
“magic” was equally vicious and many were no doubt used for
internal consumption among, for example, Christian readers.

Just as important for our purposes, these types of individual

comments tend to disguise the more nuanced edges of ancient uses
of the term, as we saw in Pliny’s case. These basic inter-group charges
do not exhaust the rhetorical uses of the term “magic” in religious
debates in the ﬁrst centuries. Early Christian writers used the term
“magic” differently depending on the type of text an author was
writing and on his intended audience. The use was inseparable from
the larger rhetorical goals.

Irenaeus, the fractious and always combative bishop of Lyon, did

not waste much ink on pagans as magicians because his real battles
were with other Christians. He yoked “heretic” and “magician”
together in order to marginalize his Christian opponents and their
followers, including Simon, Menander, Carpocrates and Basilides.
He wove together every pejorative word he could ﬁnd, describing
Marcus as “very skilled in magical imposture” and the “forerunner
of the Antichrist” (AdHaer 1.13.1).

The success of Irenaeus’ enemies in recruiting and retaining

adherents particularly irked and threatened him and was speciﬁcally
attributed to magic (AdHaer 1.13.1–6). Their “magic,” Irenaeus
admits to his chagrin, appears to work. His enemies ﬂourish and
their circles of inﬂuence grow. Here Irenaeus sounded a note very
similar to that of the author of Acts, who attributed the success of
Simon, a competing Christian proselytizer, to magic. Simon was
able to gain followers, according to the author of Acts, only because
he used sorcery and bewitched them (Acts 8:9).

For Irenaeus the charge of magic conveniently packaged with

it an explanatory tool: his enemies ﬂourish due to the help of
daimons.

That is, Irenaeus’ enemies have effective supernatural

C O N C E P T S O F

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M A G I C

”

powers on their side who bring about their successes. But these
powers are evil. In the case of major opponents, Satan himself may
be behind their successes (AdHaer 1.15.6). Their success in and of
itself is no guarantee that their work is the work of God.

Irenaeus also raised the possibility that some of his opponents’

successes were due not only to daimonic power but also to outright
fraud. Thus they are guilty of both “magical deceptions and universal
deceit” (AdHaer 1.4.7). The theme of magic as a form of fraud
surfaced in many ancient discussions of magic. It functioned as one
more aspersion to cast at opponents, appearing alongside, and not
seeming to effect, a general belief that mageia is the effective use of
supernatural forces. Thus Irenaeus was suspicious about the efﬁcacy of
some practices but basically accepted the idea that other people could
manipulate evil powers and thereby do magic (AdHaer 2.32.5).

For Irenaeus the charges remained at the level of name-calling,

unlike the later case of Priscillian who was executed by his enemies
as a heretic and magician. Irenaeus did not have the political means
to punish other Christians as magicians. Irenaeus’ theory does not
appear to be uniquely Christian. He considers the possibility that
some actions called magic may simply be fraudulent, while his real
concern was with effective actions powered by evil forces. All of
these ideas he shared with non-Christian neighbors.

For those Christian writers who were not bishops, and therefore

were less involved in issues of authority, terms associated with
mageia were employed in completely different rhetorical ﬂourishes.
Clement of Alexandria, for example, spiced up his prose with
imagery of charms, spells, and incantations in his writings. The
deity is the “holy charmer of sick souls” (Paed 1.2) and his love is
directed to people via a “love-charm” (Paed 1.3). Nor was Clement
suspicious of the magi. He claimed a relationship with previous
Greek philosophers who in turn had studied with assorted foreign
wise men among whom were the magi. They taught, among others,
Pythagoras (Strom 1.15).

Apologetic Christian texts, which defended Christians and Christi-

anity against charges of magic, perforce offered extensive defenses of
Christian practice. Simply to declare “you do magic, and I don’t”
was inadequate since the practices being defended were often
indistinguishable from forbidden ones. It was necessary to set forth
in some detail the basis for the classiﬁcation of an action as either
mageia or not.

Origen outlined his beliefs about magic in his treatise Contra

Celsum, his attempt to refute the Greco-Roman writer Celsus’ anti-

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Christian attacks.

Origen’s comments in this treatise, and other

remarks scattered in his extensive corpus, outline his lines of defense
and lead us through highly-nuanced strategies for classifying rituals
as magic. At the simplest level, Origen repeated Irenaeus’ point that
some magic is deemed mere trickery, such as making a mirage
banquet appear or vivifying non-living beings (CC 1.68). Here
Origen found himself agreeing with a Jew mentioned by his
opponent Celsus, who also cast a skeptical eye on some seemingly
supernatural events: perhaps they were juggling tricks (CC 2.55;
3.33).

More serious than these tricks were real acts of magic, that

is, actions which in the eyes of the observer put some form of
supernatural power into play. One of the main explanations for
these events, as we have already seen, was that they were the
work of daimons.

Thus Origen is quick to condemn all Greco-

Roman religion as magic dependent on evil daimonic forces (CC
5.5; 7.69; 8.2).

Pointing to daimons explains why their rites are

both successful and wrong; pagans do, for example, know how to
use songs to heal people.

The efﬁcacy of these acts does not

legitimate these actions since they are based on the work of evil
forces.

Explanations based on daimons had their limits, however. By

general agreement daimons have a limited sphere of inﬂuence. Heal-
ing and predicting the future were daimonic specialties, according
to both Celsus and Origen (CC 8.58). Daimons may, for example,
heal by trickery, taking over a body and then leaving it so that it
appears as if they have healed the person (Tatian, Disc, Chap 18.3).
More sophisticated occurrences are less likely to be their handiwork.

More complex criteria were needed for analyzing Jewish and, of

course, Christian rituals. Origen left the status of Old Testament
miracles on an ambiguous footing and is even more ambivalent on
the question of whether Christians engage in magic. Heretical
Christians might do magic, he admits, but there are not too many
of them left (CC. 1.57). Rituals done by good Christians could not
be magic, by deﬁnition, for Origen.

Most revealing is Origen’s schema of multiple interpretations for

the same event, a schema that shows the delicate hand with which
interpretation must be carried out. Origen stressed that a specialist
must sift through rumors to uncover the truth. Some testimony
about an event is simply lies (

pl£smata

), some witnesses are deceived

by daimons (CC 3.31), and others are simply misled by their own
guilty consciences (CC 3.36).

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Given the fact that Christian rituals were uncomfortably close to

suspect practices, the best that Origen could do was to muddy the
waters. All the human foibles and uncertainties he mention make
classiﬁcation elusive. It is hard to know exactly what magic is after
reading Origen’s discussion, and that, in itself, may be his best
defense.

Rabbinic classiﬁcation of magic

Rabbinic discussions of magic are very subtle and elaborate; they
were edited over a period of centuries (third to seventh) and both
beneﬁted from and synthesized much prior debate. In general, the
anecdotes about magic in rabbinic literature repeat themes familiar
from Origen, though often in more technical presentations. The
fulcrum of their presentations is the astounding leeway in the limits
and deﬁnitions of magic. Rabbinic sources do not automatically
classify anything as “magic.” When identifying an act as magic, a
series of questions must be asked to arrive at a correct classiﬁcation.
The criteria are multifaceted and subjective. The content of these
questions will be familiar from Origen and Greco-Roman discus-
sions, but the form will be true to rabbinic modes of argumentation.

In rabbinic literature strategies of deﬁnition are often as import-

ant as the deﬁnitions themselves. Learning to declare the unclean
clean, presented as a criterion for serving as a judge, is a case in
point. A rabbi can forbid an action as magic in one case yet in
another case permit a similar action. Based on this strategy it is
impossible to construct a simple list of the components of magic.
Hence the frustration modern scholars encounter when they try to
pinpoint exactly what constitutes “magic” for the rabbis.

Such

discussions involve a great deal of back-pedaling; after claiming that
rabbis forbid any forms of “magic,” it is then necessary to explain
why they engaged in or permitted so many practices which look
suspiciously like magic. It is tempting, but wrong, to repeat the
rabbinic prejudice that rabbis condescended to these actions based
on pressure from ignorant (i.e. non-rabbinic) Jews.

An obvious place to look for precursors to the rabbinic ideas is

Biblical notions of magic. This comparison is complicated by the
lack of critical analysis of Biblical theories of magic. Most
scholarship on magic in the Hebrew Scriptures fails to note the
polemical dimensions of the texts.

The equation of non-Israelite

religion, or alternative versions of Israelite religion, with magic, is
repeated as if it is a simple description and not a rhetorical stance.

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Every Biblical text which mentions a term glossed as “magic” or

“magician” in modern discourse does so to make a highly polemical
point.

Sometimes the “magicians” are the wise men and prophets

of other cultures, as in the case of the Egyptian wise men in conﬂict
with Moses. Sometimes the practitioners and prophets who were
denounced operated outside of the approved realm of the Biblical
editors. Deuteronomy 18:11, for example, forbids a number of types
of practitioners such as the

bva la>

: “he who inquires of the One-

who-Returns” and

ynidy

: “the Knower”.

Other practitioners,

imprecisely translated, include

[>km

: “augurer,” (Deut 18:10, Ex

7:11, Isa 47:9,12),

rbh rbh

: “charmer” (Deut 18:11, Ps 58:6),

]nvim

: “soothsayer” (Deut 18:10),

[>a

: “enchanter” (Dan 1:20 and

2:2),

ccq

“diviner” (Deut 18:10), and “whisperer” (Jer 8:17; Ps

58:6; Qoh 10:11; and Isa 3:3).

Many of these practices were part of Israelited religion. They did

not, however, ﬁnd favor with the later Deuteronomic editor. The
editor therefore recast the practices as part of Canaanite religion in
order to make their practice that much more scandalous.

We see similar denunciations of Temple practices by the

prophets. These freelance social critics objected to rituals which had
been taking place in the Israelite Temple for generations. Thus
Micah 3:6–7 denounces seers who operated in the Temple, but were
not part of what Morton Smith called the “Yahweh-only” party
(1987). These ﬁgures were generally denounced as false prophets,
using the terms which had come to be associated with magic.

Many of the Biblical terms for ancient practitioners were prob-

ably already obscure in the ﬁrst centuries

. The terms were

reworked in rabbinic sources. Thus

bva la>

: “he who inquires of

the One-who-Returns” was given the surprising interpretation of
someone who raises a spirit via his male organ (bSanh 65b).

The

ynidy

: “he who inquires of the Knower” was understood to be

someone who uses the bone of the Yidoa bird to give oracles (bSanh
65b). These two ﬁgures are contrasted as someone who brings up
the dead person right-side up and does not violate the Sabbath
while the other brings up his dead person upside-down and violates
the Sabbath. These rabbinic interpretations reﬂect contemporary
ideas of divination far-off from the ancient concepts.

Biblical and rabbinic strategies for classifying acts as magic do

overlap in part. The equation of magic and idolatry (2 Kings 21:6;
2 Chron 33:6; mSanh 7:7), the suspicion that women are likely to
engage in magic and the legal stance that magic is a capital
offense

are common. Beyond these, the rabbinic criteria are

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similar to those found in Greco-Roman discussions of magic and
not simple expansions of Biblical concepts.

At the heart of the rabbinic notion of magic is a series of

questions, a classiﬁcation system based on a set of criteria which can
be articulated and then used to measure various cases. Was the act
an illusion, or was it real? This issue is the starting point for the
most extended collection of anecdotes about magic in the Talmud
(bSanh 65a–67b).

This masterful and dense discussion synthesizes

in a small space a large number of complex rulings on magic. Here
the Mishnah states “The sorcerer (

[>km

) who performs an act is

liable for punishment, but the one who creates an illusion, is not”
(mSanh 7:11). The technical term for illusion is (

cyni tzyha

“tricking the eyes.” Interpretations of this ruling vary tremen-
dously.

We already encountered this standard with Origen, and

through him with Celsus and an un-named Jew.

Not every person who claimed to be able to engage supernatural

powers actually did so. Illusions could fool an unsuspecting person
who took what he saw at face value and did not realize, as a
specialist would, that no material change in the cosmos had taken
place. Illusions by their very nature are less likely to leave evidence.

Rab said to Rabbi Hiyya, I myself saw an Arabian traveler
take a sword and cut up a camel; then he rang a bell, at which
the camel arose. He replied, “After that was there any blood or
dung? But that was merely an illusion.”

(bSanh 67b; cf. jSanh 7:13)

Rabbah created a man but he was unable to answer Rabbi Zera’s
questions, proving that the supposed man was an illusion instead of
a real person (bSanh 65b). Illusions may be exempt from punish-
ment but still fall into the category of forbidden. The analogy in the
text is Sabbath laws, where some actions are not punishable but are
nevertheless forbidden. Illusions, in the ﬁnal analysis, are a sub-
category of magic, but not a very important one. Not being
consumer activists, rabbis were less interested in fraud than in the
real use of supernatural power.

The enigmatic ruling from the Mishnah is illustrated with a

story: Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus demonstrated to Rabbi Akiba
how to ﬁll a ﬁeld instantaneously with cucumbers and then to reap
them (bSanh 65b). In this case the practice is permitted, since it is
necessary to study certain phenomena in order to understand them.
The intention of an action determines its classiﬁcation.

This

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ruling is a tremendous escape clause against charges of improper
practices.

Was the act helpful to someone? Sanhedrin states that an act

which has beneﬁcial results is not magic (bSanh 67b). This principle
was well established by Origen’s time (CC 6.40). Jesus’ actions
beneﬁted mankind, Origen argued, by reducing daimons to impo-
tence. They could not, therefore, have been magic (CC 7.17; 8.43;
ComJn 1.37). Under Constantine, attempts to help people were not
criminal, nor was trying to protect a harvest from a thunderstorm.

This concept leaves room for the numerous healing rituals used

by rabbis.

The principle, however, is by no means ubiquitous or

consistently applied in rabbinic stories. To give one example, recit-
ing charms, even if the action is to prevent an animal from doing
harm, is banned in the same discussion (bSanh 65a).

The analogous principle, that magic harms, appears in a fanciful

etymology that the Biblical word glossed as magic,

{wk

, comes

from the root

whl

: “disrupts” (bSanh 67b). Magic “disrupts” the

power of the divine family, that is, the good supernatural forces
which surround the deity.

Was the deed perpetrated by a suspicious person, such as a

woman? This criterion is by no means unique to the rabbis but they
embraced it with conspicuous enthusiasm. While men are theoretic-
ally as capable of indulging in magic as women are, the gender
skewing is striking.

In an exegesis stunning in comparison to any

remark about women and magic found in any oral culture, Exodus
22:17 is said to refer to female witches since “most women are
involved in witchcraft” (bSanh 67a). Sometimes the identity of the
women referred to is ambiguous,

but in others it is Jewish women

who are being discussed. The daughters of Israel, we are told, are
“addicted” to magical practices (bErub 64b). Crossroads were
considered to be places where supernatural beings lurked. Hence
two women sitting facing each other at a crossroads are surely
engaged in magic (bPes 111a). This warning comes complete with a
formula that men can use to protect themselves from the women’s
malevolent practices.

The ﬂexibility of determining what is “magic” is nicely illus-

trated in the “Ways of the Amorites,” an eclectic catalogue of
suspect practices.

Many of these practices were common in the

Greco-Roman world, including putting amulets on horses, wearing
special haircuts, and inserting objects into the walls of houses
(H. Lewy 1893). The import of ascribing these practices to the
Amorites, biblical enemies, is somewhat obscure. A similar usage

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appears in Jubilees 29:11 where the Amorites are described as
“wicked and sinful, and there is no people today which have equaled
all of their sins.” Goldin’s suggestion that “Amorite” may be a
metathesis for “Romai” is the most convincing explanation to date
(1963: 117). The term marginalized these practices as originating in
another culture and thus not being Jewish. They are not, however,
all lumped together and condemned simply as “magic.” The rites
may have been so common that the rabbis could not convincingly
classify them as magic.

The “Ways of the Amorites” are presented to the reader as a

bewildering list of customs stripped of any context or explanation
and forbidden. Yet, in various rulings rabbis permit practices which
are identical to those in the “Ways of the Amorites.” Slight contrasts
distinguish between forbidden and acceptable practices (Goldin
1963). Leaving a light near a corpse in order to discomfort the dead
is forbidden. Doing so in order to help the soul ﬁnd its way back, is
permitted.

Throwing an iron object into a cemetery and calling

out “Hada” is forbidden, while throwing an iron object into a
cemetery in order to nullify sorcery is permitted.

Tying a red

string around a ﬁnger is forbidden; tying it around any other part of
the body is permitted.

Since the only way to tell exactly which

“Way of the Amorites” was permitted was to ask a rabbi, this strategy
effectively brought the practices within their sphere of power.

Occasionally the mechanism for “rabbinization” is laid out for us.

Suspending dates on a barren date-tree is not among the “Ways of
the Amorites” because of a proof-text from Leviticus that states
“And he shall cry ‘Unclean, unclean.’”

Just as the cry of the leper

may arouse pity, so too may the sight of the dates, and people will
then pray for the date tree.

Since a theological basis for the success

of the practice was elaborated, the practice became acceptable.

Reinterpretation of a “Way of the Amorites” can also be carried

out by examining an act based on other rabbinic rulings. In a
sweeping judgment attributed to Rabbi Johanan, a “Way of the
Amorites” is permitted if it has some healing beneﬁt (jShab 6.9,
bShab 67a). Even if the ruling was not unique to the rabbis, its
implementation was under rabbinic control. Once again the system
of classiﬁcation is the key.

It is no coincidence that the Talmud rules that anyone wishing to

be on the Sanhedrin must be able to do magic (bSanh 17a). This
statement locates the pragmatic act of employing power at the
center of any debate. Knowing how to classify something as magic
is insufﬁcient when “magic” is understood to have real efﬁcacy. A

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real expert must also know how to trump suspect use of powers. At
the same time, throughout the rabbinic anecdotes debating magic is
made to look as if it is simply an issue of taxonomy (to which
category does this act belong?). The taxonomic debate disguises the
power play behind the system.

The fantastic rhetorical success of these rabbinic presentations is

seen in their longevity. Even today we wonder about the origins of
the “Ways of the Amorites” and are likely to accept the classiﬁ-
cation of these actions as non-Jewish. It is easy to be caught up in
rabbinic debates about whether act X or Y really is magic. The
cryptic debates are an amazing achievement, leading us from
question to question without permitting us to step back and analyze
the artiﬁce of their entire debate.

Ironically, at the same time that the rabbis were developing their

criteria for why other people’s rituals were magic, powerful stereo-
types circulated about Jews as magicians. Greek literature barely
mentions either Israelites or Hebrews prior to the time of Alexander
the Great (Momigliano 1975: 74–82). When they do begin to
receive notice, it is as a nation of philosophers and “priestly sages of
the type the East was expected to produce” (Momigliano 1975: 86).
Their “alien wisdom” was often viewed with respect,

but in some

cases with suspicion and fear.

Not surprisingly this image lead to the charge that Jews engaged

in magic.

The theme appears periodically in Greek and Roman

texts from Posidonius’ claim that Jews were sorcerers who use urine
and other malodorous liquids (Strabo, Geo 16.2.43) to Pliny’s
statement that magic comes from the Jews (NH 30.11) and Celsus’
statement that Jews are addicted to magic (CC 1.26).

As Robert

Wilken writes, “What distinguished Jewish magic, at least in the
minds of many people in the ancient world, was that Jewish
magicians were more successful” (1983: 85).

These stereotypes also appear in Christian writings. Justin, for

example, considered all Jewish rituals identical to pagan rites with
their “magical fumigations and incantations” (Trypho 85.3). John
Chrysostom told Christians that it was better to die than be healed
by Jewish “charms, incantations and amulets” ( Jud 8.5.935; 8.7.
937–8). His denunciations claimed, among other things, that
daimons live in synagogues (Hom 1.6). The Council of Laodicea
prohibited “Judaizing.” This was understood as the adoption of
magical practices, including the use of phylacteries (Canon 35–7).

One result of the centuries old equation of Jews with powerful

and esoteric knowledge is that anything associated with the Jews

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and their history (objects, names, phrases) was included in ritual
texts by people who were not Jews. The Jewish divine names, for
example, were widely viewed in late antiquity as being among the
most powerful ones, and therefore most likely to make a rite work.
The Hebrew language, often without any idea of what the words
meant, was also thought to be particularly effective.

It is a mistake, however, to ignore the distinct settings and types

of texts in which these claims were made. It is not clear that the
daily interactions between Jews and non-Jews, especially early on in
our period of interest, were dominated by visions of magical Jews.

The literary stereotypes do not outweigh the extensive evidence that
Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean thrived during
this period. Those instances where there was conﬂict centered on
other issues.

With the increasing Christianization of the Roman Empire,

Judaism and paganism became more consistently suspect as
pejorative stereotypes gained the upper hand. Augustine repeats
Seneca’s denunciation of Judaism as “superstitio judaica” (CivDei
16.11). The origins of the term “superstition” are hotly debated;
early usages connect it with divination and excessive fear of gods. In
Theophrastus’ famous portrait of the superstitious man we ﬁnd an
individual whose fear of the gods dominates his mental horizon.
The term continued to be used to refer to this excessive fear; with
the rise of Christianity, however, Greco-Roman rituals were labeled
“superstitio.” Legislation against “superstitio” could then, for
example, outlaw traditional modes of divination while also taking a
swipe at pagan religious beliefs in general (Salzman 1987).

The debates preﬁgure most of the elements of modern discourse

about magic, but not in the same proportion. Fraud was a part of
the equation, but more important was any use of supernatural
power which was suspect in the eye of the beholder. While the
speciﬁc content of the various authors’ ideas of what is magic varied
quite widely from author to author, we have found striking
consistency in the criteria used to talk about the issue of “magic.”
Did an action harm someone? Who did it? What kind of effect did
it have? Was it done via evil powers? People from various religious
traditions shared these criteria across the board. This is the closest
we can get to some notion of “late antique magic.”

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DAIMONS AND ANGELS AND

THE WORLD OF EXORCISM

Staying over night in a house of study,

crushing a louse on one’s

clothing,

sitting under a drainpipe

– in the ﬁrst centuries many

seemingly simple activities exposed people to danger from evil
spirits. At the same time other supernatural ﬁgures aided and
watched over humans. In a world where all sorts of powers were at
work it was hard to sort them all out.

Angels, though they could bring blessings into one’s life, could

also be “fallen angels” who caused harm.

Other malevolent beings

were referred to in Hebrew (and Aramaic) texts as

tvhvr

: “spirits”

cyqzm

: “damagers”

and in Greek texts as

da…mwn

: “daimons”

(Latin: daimon). Augustine thought that all daimons were evil, and
the term is often translated accordingly in Christian texts as
“demons.” This was not however, the most common usage in the ﬁrst
centuries. Augustine himself cited earlier Latin writers who used the
word interchangeably with angels (CivDei 9.19). In this study,
therefore, the more neutral transliteration “daimon” will be used.

The activities of angels and daimons were so “inﬁnitely diverse”

it is hard to ﬁnd any situation for which they were not held
responsible (Cumont 1907: 173). All types of misfortunes – sudden
illness, the lost of an important item, trouble in love – were likely
to be the result of daimonic activity. All types of blessings were the
work of an angel.

These explanations were deemed true regardless of religious

tradition. Jews, Christian and pagans all looked towards both angels
and daimons as integral parts of their lives. Sometimes the obsession
with these ﬁgures led opponents to claim, for example, that Jews
worshipped angels (Col 2:18).

At the same time claims about angels

were claims of closeness to the supernatural world. Celsus protested
the Jews’ claim that God sent angels only to them (CC 5.41).

Studying daimons is a challenge since daimons as such cannot be

R E C T O R U N N I N G H E A D

studied directly. A person getting off a plane and asking to see
Hollywood is often surprised that there is no single place that
constitutes Hollywood. Seeing Hollywood involves a cluster of
activities such as touring the homes of stars, visiting studios, and
viewing the famous sign in the Hollywood Hills. So too we never
see daimons directly, but must trace the secondary evidence of their
existence through the eyes of people in the ﬁrst three centuries

They draw our attention to the evidence of the work of daimons:
overturned pots, odd markings on the ﬂoors, and the wear and tear
of rabbis’ clothes.

The rise of angelology and daimonology

The rich multitude of supernatural ﬁgures who ﬂourished in texts
from the ﬁrst three centuries

was to some extent familiar from

earlier periods. The ancient Greek world had known numerous gods,
daimons, angelic messengers (Hesiod, Theog 781; Pindar, Olym
8.82), and shades of the dead. Despite modern stereotypes of ancient
Israelite monotheism, Biblical texts mention the gods of other
nations and a repertoire of other supernatural ﬁgures.

We ﬁnd general references to large groups of angels

supple-

mented by speciﬁc references to the cherubim,

seraphim (Isa

6:1–2), “creatures” (Ezek 1:5), and the angel of the Lord.

These

are contrasted, on the negative side, by threatening ﬁgures such as
shedim (Deut 32:17; Ps 106:37) and se’rim (Isa 13:21; 34:14; Lev
17:7; 2 Chron 11:15). Lilith, who will become a major ﬁgure in
later centuries, is mentioned once (Isa 34:14). Figures such as the
sons of God (Gen 6:4; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; Ps 29:1 and Wis 5:5) and
the female consort of Yahweh known as Asherah remain obscure,
probably repressed due to the increasingly monotheistic view of the
Biblical editors.

Most important for our investigation, in the Bible angels are

primarily messengers who bring messages from the deity to human-
ity (Newsom 1992: 248). These messengers had the physical appear-
ances of humans in both Biblical and Greek texts.

It was

impossible to tell at ﬁrst glance whether a stranger was simply a
foreigner or an angel.

None of these ﬁgures were individualized with speciﬁc names

and personalities until late Biblical texts such as Daniel. The divine
messengers operate as nameless visitors or groups of “hosts” who
praise or accompany the deity. They lack histories or personalities
and do not interact with humans as part of daily life. The shocking

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

story of the sons of God coming down to earth and having inter-
course with humans results in freakish beings and is placed
ominously by the Biblical editor right before the declaration of the
corruption of earth (Gen 6:1–4).

Later Biblical texts were increasingly less likely to have the

deity appear on earth himself; instead delegating interactions with
humans to some form of representative. These supernatural repre-
sentatives were described as either the deity’s Name (1 Kings
8:16,29) or his angel. The use of these substitutes engendered
endless theological speculation (and debate) since the manner in
which they represent or stand for the deity is not always clear: Is
the Name the same as the deity himself? What is the difference
between the deity and his angelic presence?

By the ﬁrst centuries

religious texts presupposed a very differ-

ent vision of the world than the earliest Biblical texts, including
both the place of human beings and the roles of deity, angels and
daimons. In short, a much more complex angelology and daimon-
ology developed. Later Biblical texts, the texts from the Qumran
library and early apocryphal and pseudepigraphic texts all expand
on Biblical terminology, delineating new supernatural ﬁgures.
Familiar sons of heaven (1 Enoch 6:2; 13:8; 14:3) and

cyla

: “gods”

(War Scroll (1QM) 1:10; 14:15; 17:7; Hymns (1QH) 10:8) are joined
by watchers ( Jub 4:15, 21.; 1 Enoch 1:4; Test of the XII Pat 1:5;
8:3) and spirits ( Jub 15:31; 2 Macc 3:24). These are joined by the
angel of death, rulers of the cosmos ( John 12:31; Eph 2:2), ﬁgures
allied with speciﬁc nations and, the area of greatest development,
endless daimons and angels with speciﬁc names such as Michael,
Raphael, Gabriel, Raziel, and Samiel. Keeping track of all the
angels and daimons, knowing their names and their roles had
become a formidable task.

Late antique writers puzzled over the rise of such rich angelology

and daimonology. The rabbis, alert to the gulf between the few
named angels in the Bible and the much richer angelology of their
day, posited that the Jews brought the names of angels back from
Babylonia (jRH 1.2; GenRab 48). Modern scholars repeat this theory,
since some of the angel names used in the ﬁrst centuries closely
parallel Babylonian angel names and roles (Kohut 1866). This
explanation is not sufﬁcient. Where the names come from does not
explain why they were borrowed and continued to have importance.
That is, had daimons not assumed such a central role in the
cosmology at that time, there would have been no reason to borrow
names for them. The expanded angelology does clarify and ﬁll in the

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

gaps of obscure Biblical texts (Olyan 1993). But we have to ask
what it was about the historical setting that made these types of
embellishments plausible and meaningful.

A preliminary and modest goal is to outline some of the main

contours of thought which accompanied the increasing interest in
angels and daimons. Late antique religious traditions were based on
textual themes which were centuries old, many of them dating back
to the Ancient Near Eastern religions ( J. Z. Smith 1979). The
cosmology of these ancient religions, a positively evaluated three-
tiered structure of heaven above, earth in the middle, and the
underworld beneath, is labeled “locative” due to its emphasis on
knowing one’s place in the cosmic hierarchy and abiding by it ( J. Z.
Smith 1978b).

By the third century

BCE

this view was supplemented by a newer

picture in which the earth was conceived as a sphere which hung
suspended in the middle of a many layered cosmos, a theme elabor-
ated already in the Greek writer Eudoxus (390–340

BCE

) and

mirrored in endless subsequent Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian
texts. Here the old visions were supplemented by talk of multiple
heavens, a far-off deity, and escape from earthly existence to an
eternal after-life in heaven.

Jonathan Smith calls this cosmology

“utopian” due to its otherworldly emphasis (1978b: 45).

In broad strokes, Hebrew notions of “national monotheism” seen,

for example, in Isaiah, parallel to Greek “philosophical mono-
theism” in Xenocrates, revised the older, traditional model of one
highest deity for each city/nation ruling over a divine council.

was no longer thought appropriate for a deity to talk to, interact
with, guide, command and reprimand his followers directly.

The deity was still the focus of certain prayers and was not

thought to be so far beyond the realm of humans that he was not
involved in their lives. It did mean, as outlined here, that some of
the supernatural manifestations on earth which might earlier have
been thought to be the work of the deity were now considered the
work of angels and daimons. Apuleius reﬂects mid-second century

etiquette when he negates the possibility that the Gods them-

selves sent a dream to Hannibal. “It is not,” he claimed, “becoming
that the Gods of heaven should condescend to things of this nature”
(deDeoSoc 7).

In the emerging view humans lived at the center of a gigantic

cosmic network of rotating planets and stars. Nilsson summarized
the shift in relation to Greek religion, but it also applied to
emerging Jewish and Christian religious thought.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

The old cosmology was shattered and the universe expanded
dizzily. Earth was at the dead center, surrounded by the atmo-
sphere and the seven spheres each with their heavenly bodies.
The moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all
shuttled around the earth, as did the ﬁxed stars that composed
the Zodiac.

(1948: 99)

The positive and orderly image of earthly existence, so thoroughly
propagandized by the earlier royal and priestly writers in the
locative worldview, was supplemented by this new vision of the
earth as a negative and conﬁning place. Life on earth was radically
different from that in the heaven above. On earth people lived and
died, all of existence was in ﬂux and thus inferior; far above earth
was the realm of the deity, the realm of the eternal where everything
is beyond change. The atmosphere between the far-off eternal realm
and the world of human existence was like a vast no-man’s land in
which all sorts of supernatural beings ﬂourished.

The divine presence no longer dwelt in a Temple. For the prophet

Ezekiel the sins of the Israelites caused this relocation; for others it
was simply impossible to conceive of a deity who dwelt in a speciﬁc
locale. Instead the deity was everywhere, with a special cultic abode
in the highest reaches of heaven.

The Ancient Near Eastern theological staple that the deity/

deities are pleased by and partake of animal sacriﬁce was rejected
throughout the Mediterranean basin. The ancient practice was given
numerous new interpretations. A common reinterpretation was that
sacriﬁces were directed at the lower level supernatural ﬁgures such
as angels and daimons and not at the highest God (LXX Deut
32:17). Henry Chadwick calls the trope that daimons feed on
sacriﬁces “universal” (1965: 146 n.1). According to Porphyry daimons
“rejoice in libations, and the savor of sacriﬁces” (deAbst 2.42).

Jewish texts also describe the hunger of daimons for sacriﬁces.

The hereditary priest who watched over the cult lost his domain

of expertise and power. Classical prophecy died out as well. The
shift from temple to charismatic individual signaled the end of the
classical world.

More audacious ﬁgures emerged, individuals who

displayed their special status based on their esoteric knowledge and
their ability to put divine power into play. They knew the coveted
secrets of creation, the fate of the world and of the people who lived
in it. These specialists operated individually or in schools centered
around a speciﬁc teacher, no longer dependent on the ﬁxed sacred
locales of the traditional temples.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

The ancient cosmologies with their messenger-angels did not

disappear. Biblical texts and traditional Greek texts such as Homer
continued to inspire devotion and careful reading. The centuries-old
picture of the world was supplemented by the new, often darker,
vision. Texts from the ﬁrst three centuries

, many of which were

exegesis of the earlier texts, reﬂected complex mixtures of elements
from the ancient cosmology combined with the newer visions.
Messenger-angels gained importance and operated as distinct
individuals who could interact with humans in endlessly varying
ways. Humans were much more likely to encounter the divine
world via these active ﬁgures than by any direct interaction with the
deity. Rabbinic interpretations of the book of Esther, for example,
inserted roles for angels in the story (EsthRab 1.10, 3.12, 3.15, 4.2,
7.13). Angels supplied all the aid to the heroine and their inter-
ventions reshaped the story to ﬁt rabbinic concerns. Mirroring the
narrative role of the angels and daimons, the vicissitudes of daily life
were most likely the result of daimonic activity. Life had to be lived
with at least one eye out for them at all times.

Thus we come back to the question of the rise of angelology and

daimonology and see that just as a body is needed in a murder
mystery, so daimons and angels had crucial roles in making the
cosmology of the ﬁrst centuries operational.

Even as we have met the modest goal of outlining the cosmo-

logical imperatives that point to rich complexes of angels and
daimons, we are still left with the prior question of why this cosmo-
logy arose. Diffusionist theories posit the borrowing of the new
cosmology from neighboring cultures (such as the cyclically popular
option of Persia). Scientiﬁc discoveries may also drive the changing
cosmologies, since the shifting worldview articulated with Eudoxus’
mathematical description of planetary orbits. Julia Annas, for
example, argues that the widespread use of notions of pneuma/spirit
by the Hellenistic philosophers was their way of hooking into the
prestige of the advancements of empirical medicine (1992).

Whatever the causes for the shifts, endless numbers of daimons

and angels populated the cosmos in the ﬁrst three centuries and
interacted with humans in every conceivable way. Rabbis worried that
female daimons might lie in wait for men who slept alone (bShab
1516). No woman was likely to approach childbirth without
worrying about daimons who might come after her newborn child.

Many different theories about the speciﬁc origins of daimons

circulated. They could be either souls of the dead (Plato, Crat 397e–
398c),

speciﬁcally the dead from the Golden Age (Hesiod, Works

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

122–4), ghosts of the wicked ( Josephus, BJ 7.185) or ghosts of the
unjustly dead (Tertullian, deAnima 57). The gods of other people are
daimons, according to the Septuagint, offering another theory.

Yet another source for the origin of daimons was found in the

widely cited story of the beings borne from the intercourse between
the sons of God and the daughters of men described in Genesis
6:1–4. The story was lovingly elaborated to include nefarious roles
for daimons as the original bearers of many common ills (1Enoch
6–21). The offspring from these illicit liaisons were neither human
nor divine, and hence ﬁt perfectly into the search for a daimon
genealogy ( Justin, 2Apol 5).

The tendency in both ancient and modern writers when pre-

sented with such rich daimon lore is to try to systematize the data.
Plutarch’s lucid discussions, for example, summarize state-of-the-art
theorizing about daimons in the mid-second century

Plutarch

collected what he considered to be the most authoritative ideas
about daimons from his best sources. His synthesis forms the basis
of much modern discussion as well. When Plutarch looked around
for possible origins, he included Thrace, Egypt and Persia; modern
scholars have repeated all of these options.

Plutarch did not even consider the possibility that the contemp-

orary daimonology was Greek in origin, despite the fact that the
term “daimon” appears in older Greek texts. Homer, for example,
used the term daimon indistinguishably from the term for god
(theos).

Both referred to a type of divine power with no distinct

form, no personal history, and no parentage or ancestry (Brenk 1986:
2081). Homer’s usage was a far cry from the complex daimonology
which confronted Plutarch centuries later.

By Plutarch’s time the intermediary role of daimons had received

extensive elaboration. Plutarch found particularly useful Plato’s
statement that daimons are intermediaries between gods and men.

This role was familiar from older Greek stories, just as it was from
Biblical stories. Plutarch also used Xenocrates’ treatise Epinomis
which organized and explained the hierarchy of gods and daimons
more clearly than Plato had done.

Just as Plato posits matter and

nature as the underlying basis of all existence, for Plutarch daimons
are fundamental components of the cosmic hierarchy (DeDefectu
10). Souls can work their way up the ladder, and with sufﬁcient
puriﬁcation, become totally divine. Less fortunate souls fall farther
down the scale into mortality. Daimons are a structural necessity
since they are the “interpretative and ministering nature” between
gods and humans (DeDefectu 13). Their existence offers explanations

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

for all questionable rites such as eating raw ﬂesh and human
sacriﬁce, actions which were never done on behalf of the higher gods
(DeDefectu 14). So, too, all questionable stories about gods are
really just stories about daimons. The exact distinction between
daimons and greater gods is a subject for debate; daimons die, but
some, such as the Stoics, argue that only one god is truly eternal
(DeDefectu 19).

The intermediary roles of daimons were a cliché since these roles

reﬂected so closely the cosmology.

Apuleius, a mid-second century

philosopher, explained that there

are certain divine powers of a middle nature, sinuate in this
interval of the air between highest ether and earth below,
through whom our aspirations and our deserts are conveyed to
the Gods. The Greeks call them “daimons”.

(deDeoSoc 6)

Numerous authors besides these attempted to systematize the
endless angels and daimons, presenting them in speciﬁc ranks and
modes of organization, often with military motifs. Sometimes the
ranks were simply lists of names while in other cases they included
the special tasks of each type of angels. These descriptions varied
from author to author. The neo-Platonist Proclus described the
ranks and tasks of angels who were arrayed under speciﬁc gods.

Apollo, for example, was the supervisor of prophetic, musical, and
healing angels.

The Hebrew text The Book of Secrets outlines the

names and tasks of the angels arrayed in the ﬁrst six of the seven
heavens under their angelic leaders.

Despite all the attempts by ancient authors to systematize a

“daimonology,” conceptions of daimons varied widely even within
the writings of one author. All these ﬁgures were tools of the
ancient imagination used to organize, ﬁlter, and explain relation-
ships between daily life and the supernatural world. The particular
conceptualization depended on the type of text an author was
writing and the speciﬁc points he was trying to make.

Since the gods were thought to be “entirely different from men”

(Apuleius, deDeoSoc 7) they were not good tools of the imagination
for thinking about the similarities between humans and divine
beings. Daimons, on the other hand, share many human character-
istics: they have gender, personalities, special interests and abilities.
As plastic forces daimons could be utilized in an endless variety of
speculations.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

Apuleius speculated on daimons and offered more than one

theory at the same time (deDeoSoc 9). He said that while in the
human body, the human soul could be called a daimon, as in the
famous case of Socrates’ “genius.” The human soul after death could
be a daimon too. There was yet another type of daimon who was
forever free from having a body and possessed special power of
“another nature.” These were referred to as “Sleep,” “Love,” etc.

Even as simple a question as whether or not daimons have bodies

offered much opportunity for speculation and human/divine com-
parison. Daimons are like angels in that they have wings, ﬂy from
one end of the earth to another, and have foreknowledge of events
but also like humans in that they eat, drink and propagate (bHag
16a). Daimons might be described as having bodies of innumerable
forms (bBer 6a). If the appearance of daimons looks to humans as if
they cast a shadow, then what daimons teach us is that appearances
are deceiving (bYeb 122a). They have a nature which is not as
sluggish as terrestrial beings, but not as light as ethereal beings
(Apuleius, deDeoSoc 7).

The personalities were also conceived of as variations on familiar

human traits, reminiscent of earlier portrayals of the Greek gods
and narrative depictions of the Israelite deity. Daimons exhibit
human passions, which makes them much more interesting to us. If
their rites are neglected, they are likely to become jealous (Porphyry,
deAbst 2.37). And they are ambitious, instituting false worship “for
they wish to be considered as God and the power which presides
over them is ambitious to appear to be the greatest God” (deAbst
2.42).

In the end no single picture of daimons emerges even in one

writer. As mentioned above in relation to Augustine, with the rise
of Christianity daimons became more clearly identiﬁed as evil
forces. Their roles as disrupters of the cosmic order also become
more dramatic as daimons came to bear more of the weight of
responsibility for evil in the unfolding Christian theology (Wey
1957).

Life with daimons was as close as with one’s neighbours. They

could be employed by those who know how to put them to work.
The most intimate interactions were imagined, such as sexual
intercourse with daimons.

Given the opportunity, a daimon would

take up residence in a human body. If this happened, the remedy
would involve a cosmic battle. We turn now to two such battles,
one Christian and the other from a Jewish-inﬂuenced ritual
preserved in a Greek text.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

Daimons, possession and exorcism

In the popular movie Men in Black, an intergalactic alien is appre-
hended when he tries to sneak over the United States border with a
group of illegal human aliens. His true identity is revealed when he
is unable to answer questions in Spanish. In the ﬁrst centuries

supernatural “alien” spirit could take up residence in a human body
only to be unmasked by making an ancient faux pas. Just as only the
Men in Black can recognize an alien hidden in a human body
(though we in the audience get lots of hints), cunning and know-
ledgeable daimon experts were required to combat late antique
daimons. Hollywood’s specialists dress in black suits, armed with a
fantasy array of secret weapons. In the ﬁrst centuries in order to
unmask a daimon and drive it from someone’s body the ofﬁciant
himself had to have more-than-human status.

While superﬁcially similar, exorcisms in different cultural

contexts demonstrate the culturally speciﬁc ways in which the inter-
actions between human and supernatural ﬁgures are conceived. The
conceptions of self and body which underlie an exorcism will differ
from setting to setting. Janice Boddy warns us that the conception
of self that underlies Zar possession in North Africa is distinct from
Western notions (1989). Thus, in turn, surface similarities between,
for example, the hysterical woman and the woman possessed in the
Zar cult may conceal fundamental differences in the role of the
exorcistic rituals. When notions of the “self” are already highly
identiﬁed with the community, and in turn with idealized notions
of femininity, as in the Zar culture, possession takes on different
contours than in cases with highly developed notions of self as
found in the West. In the case of the Zar cult the woman must learn
through the exorcism not to deny her sense of otherness, but exactly
the opposite, to increase her sense of control over aspects of her
being.

Signs of possession are also culturally diverse, from not laughing

to using inappropriate language and gestures.

Sometimes demons

are put “in place” by comically belittling them and in turn gaining
control over the fears associated with them (Kapferer 1979).

Late antique models of exorcism are distinct even from earlier

Greek human/divine interactions, even though they also included
models of possession (W. O. Smith 1965). In earlier ages the divine
spirits controlled humans not by invading their bodies but by
affecting their emotions more indirectly. Some types of daimonic

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

possession were also familiar from ancient Semitic traditions,
though again it is not clear if the underlying model is the same as
that found in the ﬁrst centuries

The primary model of exorcism, which was the “Late Antique

drama par excellence,”

was based on a deep-seated suspicion of

the body. The equation of the body with evil forces arose as the
“utopian” model spread in the Greco-Roman world and thus among
Jews as well. It was later adopted enthusiastically by Christians. The
older notion that the body was part of the natural world which was
essentially good was supplemented by concern that the body con-
ﬁned and constrained the soul. Even the rabbis, who rejected celibacy
and had a role for highly-regulated sex in marriage, were profoundly
anxious about the body (Boyarin 1993: 197–225). As in so many
cultures, controlling the body was in part implemented by controlling
female bodies.

Our central concern is not to condemn the negative evaluation of

the body, an attitude that differs from modern discourse about
bodies, or to try to apologize for it.

Instead we need to understand

the intense focus on the human body which it entailed.

The Community Rule (1QS), from the library found at the Qumran,

offers a rich example of the developing focus on the body.

While

law was an ancient component of the Israelite worldview, the types
of activities legislated in the text are strikingly new. It is hard to
envisage them as being of interest to the ancient legislators with a
locative view of the world. Interrupting a companion while speak-
ing (7.10), gesticulating with the left hand (7.16), falling asleep
during an assembly (7.11), and guffawing foolishly (7.15) – all these
actions are subject to punishment.

The code implies that people should be able to control their

bodies in such a way as to eliminate any spontaneous behavior. If
each individual cannot accomplish this on his own, the rulebook
will help him learn to do so. The code itself will make him aware of
bodily actions usually done without thinking and without inten-
tion. The body must be controlled entirely in order for it not to be a
threat. These regulations are in a code which already imagines a
community devoid of women, eliminating the special threat of
female bodies. The male bodies needed still further control in order
to be part of the holy community and have access to holy rites.

Not every text was as extreme, but by the ﬁrst century

con-

trolling and escaping the body had become a model for escaping the
evils of earthly existence. Human bodies were inseparable from

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

human passions, which were liable to lead individuals astray.
Controlling the body was a means of controlling all the evils of
bodily existence.

Since controlling the body was so important, in the ﬁrst centuries

any type of spontaneous and unwilled bodily gesture might be a
sign of possession by a hostile being. Signs of daimonic possession
in the New Testament include falling into ﬁre and water (Matt
17:15), convulsions (Mark 1:26; 9:20; Luke 4:35), foaming at the
mouth (Luke 9:39), raving (Mark 5:6), grinding of teeth (Mark
9:18), or showing great ﬁerceness and abnormal strength (Matt
8:28; Mark 5:4; Luke 8:29). Acting in a crazy or insane manner was
also evidence of possession ( John 8:48; 10:20).

The standard vocabulary of exorcism emerged in the ﬁrst centur-

ies

(Kotansky 1995). The ﬁrst extant uses of the verb

™xork…dzw

“drive out (by oath)” and the noun “exorcist” both appear in the
writings of the mid-second century satirist Lucian. In one of his
satires Lucian described a Syrian exorcist famed for his power over
spirits. The exorcist claimed to heal possessed individuals by
directly questioning the spirits who make people foam at the mouth
and fall down in the moonlight (Lover of Lies 16).

Lucian mocked the entire procedure. Skeptical of the proceed-

ings, one of the characters comments ironically that daimons are
just about as visible as Platonic forms. Another unﬂattering portrait
by Lucian of an exorcist, preserved only in fragmentary form, refers
to the stinking mouth of the exorcist (AnthPal 11.427).

The term “exorcist” also appears in an astrological text, Astro-

logical Inﬂuences, written by Ptolemy in the second half of the second
century. Ptolemy explained that in certain phases the planets
produce “persons inspired by the gods, interpreters of dreams and
exorcists” (14.4). The term is listed as one of several types of experts
on divine matters and appears to need no explanation.

The Book of Acts includes the earliest extant Christian use of the

term “exorcist” in a striking story about itinerant Jewish exorcists
(Acts 19:11–16). This usage is perhaps somewhat earlier than the
ﬁrst appearances in Greco-Roman texts.

Seven brothers, described

as sons of the chief priest, try to perform an exorcism using Jesus’
name. They attempt to drive out the daimon with a common
formula of adjuration “I adjure you by . . .”

The spirit turns back

on them and taunts them “Jesus I recognize, and Paul I know, but
who are you?” Their attempt fails and they are driven naked out of
the house of the possessed man.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

In contrast Paul’s healings, mentioned in the previous verses, are

presented as miracles coming from the deity via Paul. Even the
cloth he touched is effective in healings (Acts 19:11–12). The
Jewish exorcists used only the divine name “Jesus”, one that might
appear to be an odd choice for Jews. As unlikely as this seems, a
Jewish-inﬂuenced exorcism discussed below includes an adjuration
of daimons by the “God of the Hebrews, Jesus.”

In Acts the emphasis is not on the daimon, but on the all-too-

human exorcists. These ﬁgures were of high status, identiﬁed as sons
of the Jewish chief priest Sceva. No chief priest by that name is
known from other sources and even the title is suspect; the import
of the name was as a way of referring to a high ranked, cultic Jewish
ﬁgure. Josephus tells us about a contemporary named Eleazar who
did exorcisms using techniques associated with Solomon (Ant
8.46–9). Eleazar’s claim to authority is not noted, other than the
fact that he had access to ancient wisdom. The story from Acts, in
contrast, is about high-ranking Jewish ritual failure. This, as it
were, reverse exorcism leads not to getting rid of daimons but
instead to a supernatural expulsion of the would-be-exorcists. While
other New Testament exorcisms reveal the heavenly status of the
individual carrying it out,

here the story reveals the human status

of the exorcists. The priests turn out to be fully human and they
themselves are subjected to supernatural control. The point is the
same, since it is in the context of the exorcism that we are able to
for a moment to see the truth about exactly who is a supernatural
power and who is not.

The anecdote from Acts is very compressed, presupposing a

familiarity by the reader with more detailed exorcism stories. From
other stories in the New Testament, Greco-Roman and rabbinic
texts we can reconstruct a fairly standard repertoire of exorcistic
techniques. These included looking upwards, sighing or groaning,

making hand gestures (such as making the sign of the cross),
spitting, invoking the deity and speaking “nonsense” words or letter
strings.

Sometimes the daimon was commanded to speak as a way

of demonstrating both his presence in the human body and the
practitioner’s control over him.

Use of divine names in rituals, including exorcisms, is an immense

topic. The efﬁcacy of names is a sub-set of the general ability of
words to have effects on their contexts of use; it is a mistake to see
the use of names as qualitatively distinct from other effective uses of
words. Promises, legal formulas, namings, and religious formulas

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

such as “I now pronounce you man and wife” are all examples of
uses of words to “do things.”

Socially conceived effects of language on the contexts of use are

culture-speciﬁc. Legal and religious formulas, for example, do not
translate easily from culture to culture. Great care must be taken in
ﬁnding out the speciﬁc notions by which words are socially under-
stood to have contextual implications.

Texts from the ﬁrst three

centuries include a wide variety of ideas, some quite old, about
effective and unusual language uses that had implications for
rituals. Gods, or daimons, might speak a distinct language which
may or may not be comprehensible by humans; inspired speech
might also sound like nonsense to humans.

Already in the fourth century

BCE

a group of words referred to

as the Ephesian Letters were used on tablets and rings:

£skiou;

kat£kion; l…x; tetr£x; damnameneÚja#sia

Athenaeus preserves

for us Anaxlas’ fourth century

BCE

unﬂattering picture of a country

snob who wears the letters engraved on little bits of leather (Deip
12.548). Their special relationship to exorcisms is evident in
Plutarch’s disparaging association of them with “magi” who tell
people to recite the words over themselves in order to get rid of
daimons (QuesCon 7.5).

The origin of these words was unknown in antiquity, though

there are many theories. Given their murky origins, explanations of
their efﬁcacy probably varied with different ancient authors.
Common tropes in late antiquity for the power of letter-strings
included that they were foreign words, divine names or the names of
daimons. As daimon names, for example, they were ready for use to
control and exorcise any wayward daimon. Clement of Alexandria
believed that they had symbolic import (Strom 5.8).

The names of divine beings, including gods, angels and daimons,

were thought to have special roles. Divine names did not merely
refer to the objects (beings) they named; instead they were direct
manifestations of the divine forces. They function similarly to sig-
natures and signature guarantees in our culture, which are under-
stood to be legally binding representations. In modern terminology,
their function is not based on their semantics, that is, their reference
to some speciﬁc object or idea but instead on their relationship to
the contexts of use. Each utterance of a divine name activates that
force within the ritual, supplying the power to make the ritual
effective. These ideas were particularly important in rabbinic
traditions where the divine name was understood to be the creative
and ordering word par excellence ( Janowitz 2001).

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

Jesus is presented in the New Testament as being able to drive

out a daimon by speaking a single word (Matt 8:16).

His ability

to speak in this effective manner is an index of his power. His
disciples drive out daimons using Jesus’ name, which was widely
recognized in Jewish and Christian circles as having special power.

In a rabbinic exorcism Rabbi Simon ben Yohai meets a daimon on
the road who later possesses a member of the Emperor’s family. The
rabbi is able to exorcise the daimon simply by uttering his name and
telling him to depart (bMeil 17b).

The phrase “Jesus, God of the Hebrews,” as mentioned above,

occurs in an exorcism text from the set of Greek papyri referred to in
modern scholarship as Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) (4.3007–86).

Here we ﬁnd not a condensed reference to a failed rite as in Acts, but
a detailed outline of how to carry out a successful one. The exorcism
is structured as follows:

1 Opening instructions:

A tested charm of Pibechis for those possessed by daimons.
Take oil of unripe olives with the herb mastigia and the fruit
pulp of the lotus, and boil them with colorless marjoram
while saying, “IOEL . . . come out from NN.”

2 Instruction for making an amulet:

The phylactery: On a tin lamella write “IAEO. . . . ” And
hang it on the patient . . . place [the patient] opposite you,
adjure . . .

3 A verbal formula for recitation:

This is the adjuration: I adjure you by the God of the
Hebrews, Jesus IABA . . . who appears in ﬁre . . .

I adjure you by the one who appeared to Osrael in a shining

pillar and a cloud by night who saved his people from the
Pharaoh [list of additional wonders]

I adjure you by the seal which Solomon placed on the

tongue of Jeremiah [long list of more wonders by the deity]

4 Closing instructions:

And I adjure you, the one who receives this adjuration, not to
eat pork, and every spirit and daimon, whatever sort it maybe,
will be subject to you. And while adjuring, blow once,
blowing air from the tips of the feet up to the face, and it will
be assigned. Keep yourself pure, for this charm is Hebraic and
is preserved among pure men.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

The exorcism is attributed to an Egyptian wonder-worker named
Pibechus, meaning falcon. The Greek Magical Papyri are replete with
Egyptian deities such as the sun god Amon, Osiris, the jackal-
headed god of mummiﬁcation Anubis, and Thoth, the Egyptian
god of wisdom often associated with Hermes. References to these
gods, their priests, animals associated with Egyptian religious
practice and hieroglyphics are all means of incorporating the
ancient, secret and powerful traditions of Egypt. The papyrus itself,
we must remember, was found in Egypt, preserved due to the
favorable weather conditions.

In this particular exorcism there are few obviously Egyptian

elements in the rest of the rite beyond the reference to Pibechus.
The rite shows several other signs of being a composite of more than
one exorcism, perhaps one of which was Jewish.

The complex of

actions places us squarely in the realm of a ritual expert, with a
great disparity between the knowledge demanded of the one doing
the exorcism versus the one who is possessed. The casual reader of
the papyrus would ﬁnd much of the text technical and obscure,
requiring extensive knowledge of the animal and vegetable world as
well as knowledge about daimons and their roles.

The ﬁrst section produces a concoction, which presumably was

applied to the patient. Anointing sick people with olive oil or
herbal mixtures was a widespread practice. In this case a complex
mixture is created which itself requires both mixing ingredients and
knowing formulas to say over them. The insertion of the patient’s
name in the formula is followed by “etc.” implying that the practi-
tioner must know enough to complete the rite on his own.

Herbs were thought to be particularly effective in drawing out

daimons, in addition to the numerous other roles they played in
healing. The herbs themselves might have been gathered with the
recitation of a special formula such as found elsewhere in the papyri
(PGM 4.286–95). Josephus mentioned a root named Baaras after
the ravine where it is found. This root, which had to be extracted
with great care due to its lethal potency, was used in exorcisms. It
expelled daimons when used on an afﬂicted person (BJ 7.180–5). So
too the rabbis ruled that it is permissible to wear an amulet on the
Sabbath that contains writings or herbs (jShab 6.2).

The construction and use of amulets (section 2) was widespread

in the ﬁrst centuries and will be discussed at greater length in the
next chapter.

The amulet produced for this exorcism comes with

its own guarantee; it is of the type, which is “terrifying to every
daimon, a thing he fears” (3017–18).

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

Section 3 of the rite incorporates the power of divine names, as

discussed above. In this exorcism divine names appear in both the
easily recognizable form, such as Jesus, and as strings of letters. The
letter strings alternate with short descriptions of the deity’s actions,
one of which describes the creation of the daimon in “holy paradise.”
Since the deity made the daimon, he should be able to re-assert his
control over the wayward being.

This section also contains a long list of wonders which are a

mini-summary of Israelite history (historiola).

The summary

simultaneously establishes the power of the deity who stands behind
the exorcist and the genealogy of the exorcist himself. Each story of
divine aid given in the past makes it more likely that divine aid will
come again, shifting the historical precedents into the present
episode. A similar goal is reached in Navaho healing ceremonies via
elaborate sand paintings depicting mythical themes, each one
constructed speciﬁcally for a certain rite. The patient then sits in
the middle of the painting, literally embedding his or her personal
story directly into the myth portrayed in the sand painting (Gill
1981).

In a Christian-inﬂuenced Mayan exorcism recorded recently in the

Yucatan the altar is transformed from an everyday shelf into a place
where the spirits appear (Hanks 1996: 184). The ofﬁciant calls upon
the earth spirits to come and force out the winds which are harming
the patient from the area of the altar. In contrast, in just the same
way the body of the beneﬁciary is swept clean of the winds. In our
late antique exorcism the contested space is the patient’s body. He is
not brought into contact with sacred space in order to focus divine
power on him. Instead it is the divine power manifest in the person
of the exorcist which “sweeps clean” the daimon. The daimon may
only be banished as far as the next body. Often this is a human body
since daimons are looking for human bodies to use as homes.

The Mayan healing ceremony effects “the production and

transformation of lived space,” by “creating a universal space.” The
story of the speciﬁc patient is universalized and the universal spirits
make a particular appearance in the rite. In the Pibechus exorcism
we see a similar universalizing of the patient’s story, as it is placed
within the history of the Israelite deity, and a particularizing of the
deity’s story by manifesting his power for the beneﬁt of the speciﬁc
patient. The rite itself also transforms the setting. The participation
of the supernatural power is manifested by the use of the third
person (the One who . . .) just as in the Mayan exorcism.

The exorcist employs the seal of Solomon, that is, a ring with the

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

seal of Solomon on it (section 4). As daimon lore grew in the ﬁrst
centuries, a vast part of it was associated with Solomon and his seal.
The brief Biblical reference to Solomon’s great wisdom, his proverbs
and songs and his knowledge of plants and animals (1 Kings
4:29–34) was expanded to include his encyclopedic knowledge of
astrology, the power of roots and the forces of spirits (Wis 7:15–22).
An entire text, The Testament of Solomon, recounts Solomon’s power
over the daimons as he puts them to work at building the Temple.

While the deity ruled the world, Solomon ruled the world of

daimons (ApocAdam 7.13) and inherited special exorcistic music from
David (Ps-Philo, LiberAntBib 60).

References to Solomon and his

powers over daimons decorate amulets,

door lintels,

and ceramic

amulet bowls buried outside houses.

Numerous Christian writers

such as Origen (ComMatt 23.110; PG 13, col 1757) and “On the
Origin of the World” (NHC II, 5.107,3) from the Christian library
found at Nag Hammadi refer to Solomon and his power over
daimons.

The rabbis repeat the trope as well, describing Solomon’s power

over beasts and birds (Targum Sheni to Esther).

Later tradition

attributes the Book of Healings destroyed by Hezekiah to Solomon
(jBer 10a, bPes 56a; Duling 1975: 16). Solomon was often pitted
against Asmodeaus, known in rabbinic literature as the “king of
daimons.”

Exorcism stories from the ﬁrst centuries are replete with refer-

ences to Solomon’s mysterious ring. It was presumed to have been
passed down through the generations to contemporary wise men.
The ring accrued to itself the power of these generations of men
who employed it, as well as the initial power it received from
Solomon. Josephus described an exorcist named Eleazar who held a
ring under the nose of the possessed person while reciting Solomon’s
name ( Josephus, Ant 8.46–9). According to a rabbinic story the
ring had the name of God written on it, not at all surprising given
the centrality of the divine name in Judaism.

Early Christian

pilgrims were told that St Sylvia was able to see Solomon’s ring
among the relics which the church owned.

Solomon is not invoked often in the PGM which contain many

classical names such as Aphrodite and Artemis (M. Smith 1979:
133). Many more references to Solomon are found on the numerous
gemstones extant from late antiquity. These precious and semi-
precious stones, engraved with a stereotyped mode of decorations,
were worn as amulets. They invoke primarily Egyptian and Jewish
names (M. Smith 1979: 133). Their particular vocabulary of

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

decoration (lion-headed serpent, “attacked” eye) appears to be
distinct from the references to stones in the Greek papyri. The
surprisingly strict divide between the gemstones used for curing
digestion, gout and aching back and the references to stones in the
PGM is valuable evidence of the specialization of esoteric know-
ledge. Solomon and his seal were so famous that he is a crossover
ﬁgure, appearing in both the PGM and on the gems.

The closing of the text clearly identiﬁes it with Hebrews and

Hebrew traditions, as does the historiola and many of the divine
names. The references are sometimes distorted, or based on stereo-
types as in the references to not eating pork and staying pure, as if
the editor had limited direct knowledge of Jewish traditions.

Decades ago Knox argued that the text could have been employed

in synagogues.

The Pibechus rite as preserved, however, is part of an

extensive collection of rituals edited in Greco-Roman circles but not
Jewish ones (unlike The Book of Secrets discussed in the next chapter).
These references point us to the international reputation of the
Hebrews/Jews for secret wisdom (Chapter 1). The ritual combines
two of the great stereotypes from the ﬁrst centuries: the centrality of
both Hebrews and Egypt as sources of powerful wisdom.

The Pibechus exorcism contrasts with the exorcism of the daimon

Asmodeus described in the wry novel Tobit, often presented as the ﬁrst
Jewish possession story.

In this novel, which pokes fun at all the

characters, a pious man from Judah named Tobit is blinded when
bird-droppings fall into his eyes while he naps under a tree. His
regular religious activities, including zealous burial of neglected
corpses, do not protect him from this humiliating calamity. He is
rescued through the help of the angel Raphael, who, disguised as a
fellow traveler, helps Tobit’s son to procure a ﬁsh whose entrails cure
his blindness and furthermore smoke out a daimon who has been
haunting his daughter-in-law-to-be’s bridal chamber. The exorcism in
Tobit is a modiﬁed sacriﬁce.

Reversing the “pleasing odor” of the

Biblical sacriﬁces, the odor of the ﬁsh’s liver and heart drives off the
daimon before he can make the new bridegroom his eighth victim.

The papyrus exorcism is a highly professionalized version that

seems far removed from the simple story in Tobit. The human
exorcist, who procures the items he needs based on his training (and
the written instructions he uses), has displaced the divine inter-
vention represented by the angel. The entire procedure is more
elaborate, especially the verbal formulas. We ﬁnd few exorcisms from
the ﬁrst centuries

that have no verbal formulas at all, as in Tobit.

The war of words between the exorcist and the daimon is too central.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

The Tobit exorcism still has links with the older locative world-

view. The daimon has to be driven off from human society, bound
by Raphael so that he can never return to bother humans again. In
both our examples of exorcism rituals the supernatural forces
gathered to combat the daimon had to outweigh its power, either by
the power of a divine name alone or by the rite which combined an
amulet with the recitation of stories of divine power. The human
world exists in the sphere of the daimons and their natural homes
are in human bodies. In this ﬁnely calibrated ﬁght the true status of
each combatant is revealed only in the battle itself. Our examples of
exorcism are presented as daring attempts to tear off disguises and
show the world as it really is. In the process of the exorcism itself, a
human is brought once more within the protecting realm of the
good supernatural powers, but not without effort.

The focus on bodies that marked the ﬁrst centuries leads us to

expect an emphasis on exorcism. That is, stories of exorcism lead us
inexorably to bodies. “[T]he very notion of possession,” Janice
Boddy reminds us, “indicates from the outset that the body is the
locus of negotiation between the spirits and the initiate and of the
redeﬁnition of her identity” (1989: 89).

With the rise of the utopian worldview, the human body gained

prominence as the battleground for conﬂicts between human and
supernatural forces. Evil forces were so closely intertwined with life
on earth the war had to be fought one body at a time. It is in this
context that baptism came to include an exorcism, marking the
body of the new Christian as aligned with Christ.

The daimon is

not being sent back to his home. Instead, getting rid of the evil
force is dependent on a miraculous intervention by the deity, since
the human world is the natural place for daimons to lurk. Tremen-
dous effort must be made to intervene. The deity has not so much to
retake space that was already his as to manifest his divine power in
the midst of the world of the daimonic. The deity and the exorcist
are the intruders here since it is natural for human bodies to house
daimons.

If the exorcist fails, he himself can be driven out, as in

the story in Acts, and the reign of the daimonic continues.

Through this whole discussion we are far from the realm of

magic, until we ﬁnd some of these rituals being labeled magic in
the modern period. Exorcism was too integral a part of the late
antique world to be cast in doubt.

A person’s body was the ﬁnest

instrument for gauging just how corrupt the world had become and
the battle against evil was fought one body at a time.

T H E W O R L D O F E X O R C I S M

ANCIENT RITES FOR

GAINING LOVERS

Ancient Hebrew instructions for how to cause a woman to fall in
love with a man state that the ﬁrst task is to take two small sheets
of tin and write on one the name of a man and on the other the
name of a woman, along with a list of angel names. Next follows a
prayer for recitation:

I ask of you, angels who rule the fates of the children of Adam
and Eve, that you do my will and bring in conjunction the
planet of N son of N into conjunction with (the planet of) the
woman N daughter of N. Let him ﬁnd favor and affection in
her eyes and do not let her belong to any man except him.

The tin sheets should then, on the 29th day of the month, be put

into a furnace or into a bath frequented by the woman. In order for
this procedure to be effective, the practitioner is told to abstain
from meat, sexual intercourse, and wine (The Book of Secrets [Heb.:
Sefer ha-Razim] SHR 2.31–45).

Another ancient set of instructions for the same purpose, this

time written in Greek, begins with a wax or clay model of a man
and woman. Secret ingredients are tied on the neck of the female
ﬁgurine and strings of letters are engraved on each of the woman’s
limbs. The practitioner then pierces the model, reciting a formula “I
pierce her so she will remember only me.” Next the practitioner is
told to write a formula on a tablet, tie it to the statue with 365
knots, recite a short formula out loud and then bury the statue in
the grave of someone untimely or violently dead. The text explains
that the secret ingredient tied to the neck of the female ﬁgurine
comes from the body of a daimon(!), though it is so secret that it
cannot even be clearly explained in the text (PGM 4.296–466).

R E C T O R U N N I N G H E A D

These rites, simply put, are shocking to modern sensibilities, and

thus distanced from what are thought to be normative religious
practices and concerns. The ﬁrst is from The Book of Secrets, which,
despite the general demise of the category “magic,” is still described
by many modern scholars as a classic example of late antique Jewish
“magic.”

Similarly, the second rite is from the Greek Magical Papyri.

The texts automatically become the work of ancient magicians who
lurked at the edge of society trying to avoid representatives of
ofﬁcial religion and the law.

Scholars reinforce this interpretation of the social context of the

rituals by adding the word “magic” to their translations of the text.
Morgan, for example, translates

qci

: “practice” as “practice magic”

and

h>im

: “rite, action” as “magical rite” (1983: 21). Numerous

insertions of the word “magic” occur in the recent English trans-
lation (Betz 1986) of the Greek papyri as well, such as “magical
material” for “material” (4.304), “magical power” for “authority”
(1.216), and “magical operation” for “operation” (4.161).

Hebrew terms for magic do not occur anywhere in The Book of

Secrets. In the thousands of lines of papyri the Greek word for magic
and its derivatives occur in only a few places: “initiate of sacred
magic” (1.126–30), “magical soul” (4.243), “chief of all magicians”
(4.2289) and in an injunction that the masses should not practice
magic (12.401–7). Some of the phrases, such as “sacred initiate,” may
draw on the positive connotations associated with the magi we
saw, for example, in Clement of Alexandria’s writings. They do not
warrant associating the mass of rituals with modern notions of magic.

As a starting point for analyzing the love rites, the textual

traditions classify the actions as a particular type of action. They are
referred to in the Hebrew texts as

h>im

: “rite, action” and in Greek

pr©xij

: “rite, action.” Rabbinic literature refers to a category of

practitioner employing the same term

h>im >ya

: “man of rite,

action.” One of the most famous of these practitioners, Honi the
Circle-Drawer, was famed for bringing rain by drawing a circle on
the ground and reciting prayers.

These ﬁgures appear to have been

in competition with the rabbis, having their own sources of know-
ledge and power.

In The Book of Secrets, the “rites” are explicitly connected with

ancient traditions which pre-date even Biblical texts. The opening
of the composition describes the text as “a book from the books of
secrets” given by the angel Raziel to Noah before he went into the
ark.

The claim to status as a heavenly book, a pre-ﬂood esoteric

tradition revealed only to the few, was a common trope in apo-

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

cryphal and pseudepigraphic texts.

This claim is supplemented by

a chain of transmission similar to that found in rabbinic texts (Avot
1.1), a step towards the “rabbinization” of the rite traditions.
Another step towards incorporating the rites in a rabbinic frame-
work is the inclusion of hymn material in the seventh heaven. These
hymns connect the entire text with rabbinic liturgy.

The Greek term

pr©xij

: “rite, action” is a very broad term used in

many cultural settings. It often focused on the practical aspects of
some endeavor, that is, instructions as opposed to theoretical investig-
ations. In the papyri the term refers to the technical contextual
aspects of achieving a particular goal, that is, which items must be
used and which words recited in order to achieve success. This does
not mean that a “rite” is without any theological underpinnings; only
that these will not be discussed under the topic of “rite.” The Greek
rites are also presented as ancient wisdom, sometimes referred to
speciﬁcally as “traditional” (PGM 1.54) and sometimes connected with
ancient ﬁgures such as Pythagoras and Democritus (PGM 7.795).

Some parts of the rites in the Greek and Hebrew handbooks are

identical, such as praying to Helios (SHR 4.60; PGM 4.247) and
making amulets (SHR 2.63; PGM 4.80). Common goals include
knowing the future (SHR 5.15; PGM 4.3210 and 7.540–78),
healing (SHR 1.29; PGM 7.193–214), talking to or questioning
various types of spirits (SHR 3.175; PGM 7.505–28), and gaining
power or inﬂuence over enemies and friends (SHR 2.18; 2.46 PGM
10.24–35; 12.397–400).

The range of goals is quite striking. Serious requests for healing

occur next to the seemingly comic, such as one recipe promising to
ﬁll a room up with smoke in order to impress friends. Rites to make
the practitioner immortal are juxtaposed with attempts to avoid
getting drunk.

Reading through the texts is often bewildering. The rituals appear

to be in no particular order. They combine dense sets of instructions
with long lists of angel names. Numerous objects are mentioned
ranging from the familiar (ﬂour, incense) to the more exotic (ashes
from an idol, lion’s heart). The Book of Secrets does have a clear
structure based on the model of seven heavens. The ﬁrst six levels
outline the placement of the angelic camps in that level, the names
of the angels, the tasks over which they are appointed, and how the
angels can be employed. The seventh and ﬁnal heaven contains only
hymns praising the deity.

The Greek handbooks do not have any clear overall organization.

They mirror most closely the arrangement of rites within the

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

individual heavens of The Book of Secrets where similar themes re-
appear in various sections with no clear organization.

Emendations,

variants, and multiple copies of the same rite demonstrate the status
of the papyri as ancient working documents (Nock 1972: 178–9).
The Book of Secrets is somewhat cleaner, but strikingly similar.

Assigning a precise date to these handbooks and the rituals they

contain is difﬁcult. Dating The Book of Secrets depends on a single
reference to the Roman indiction (“the ﬁfteen year cycle of the
reckoning of the Greek kings”) in 1.27–8. This system was insti-
tuted in 312

, though not used for non-ﬁscal concerns until the

second half of the fourth century (Margalioth 1966: 24–5).

The

reference dates only the ﬁnal editing of the handbook; it probably
contains rituals from a much earlier period. The bulk of the Greek
papyri included in the collection date from the fourth century. Here
again they include earlier material such as short compositions which
date to the second century (Nock 1972: 176).

All of the rites in The Book of Secrets employ angels as helpers.

Angels of silence are asked to help silence powerful people (2.20) and
angels of ﬁre help extinguish a ﬁre (3.29). Most of the Greek texts
also employ helpers, referred to by the term

paredroj

: “assistant.”

Morton Smith estimated that 70 per cent of the PGM employ such
helpers (1986: 68).

Given the centrality of these helpers, the key to success in these

rites is getting the assistants to do their jobs. Verbal formulas direct
the assistants. Many of the formulas are adjurations which use
ﬁrst person singular forms of

iybwm

: “adjure, swear” and

?rk…xw

“adjure, swear.”

Adjurations are a form of swearing or oath-taking,

distinct because they implicate the individual toward whom the
adjuration is directed and not the one making the adjuration.
Adjuring was a common practice in the ﬁrst centuries. Pliny
remarks that people adjure the gods before any dangerous under-
taking (NH 28.4). A speciﬁc adjuration might invoke a deity

simply refer in general to “Name.”

Jews who were reluctant to use

adjurations could attain the same social goal by taking an oath that
would make them into liars if the angels did not fulﬁll the
requests.

Adjurations appear frequently on amulets, as for example, “I

adjure you, the spirit of the bones” (Naveh and Shaked 1985,
amulet no. 1) and “I adjure against Marten daughter of Qoriel”
(amulet no. 8). They also occur on the clay bowls buried near
houses as protective amulets, with formulas such as “I adjure you, I
adjure you in the name of he who is great” (bowl no. 6).

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

Adjurations were so common that they appear in rabbinic stories

without attracting any attention. We hear, for example, of R. Joshua
b. Levi adjuring the angel of death (bKet 77b).

When the angel

gives him a cosmic tour which permits him a premature glimpse of
paradise, the rabbi jumps down into paradise and refuses to go back
to earth and die. He adjures the angel so that the angel will not be
able to take him back. As always in rabbinic stories, the point of the
story is about something else (in this case the importance of
fulﬁlling one’s vows); the reference to the adjuring of the angel is
off-hand and without controversy. The context here is of a struggle
between near equals, a battle of wits and words in which the rabbi
can overcome the natural order (die ﬁrst, then paradise) if his oath
against the angel works.

Adjuring angels, as an extension of oaths, is a mode of legal

discourse – an unusual mode perhaps since one party is supernatural.
The ofﬁciant is trying to make the angel comply with a demand
based on common social practices for bringing about compliance.
Angels are implicated in the legal structures of the general society,
now extended to the supernatural level. The thrust of the formulas
is to put the angels in a situation in which they cannot refuse to
help the person making the request. They can no more pretend
that they did not hear the request than someone can ignore a
summons.

Just as arguing before the Supreme Court requires a special kind

of training, adjurations in these ritual handbooks reﬂect specialized
training. The ofﬁciant needs to have encyclopedic knowledge of
where angels/daimons live, what their roles are, their regular and
secret names, which items are related to them and how their names
reﬂect their spheres of activity. All of this esoteric knowledge
reinforces the legal formulas since it heightens the practitioner’s
status as an expert.

Neither of the love-binding formulas described above includes

the speciﬁc verbs of adjuration. They are constructed using formulas
familiar from other ritual settings. Christopher Faraone delineates
four types of formulas found on deﬁxiones, small sheets of metal
engraved with binding formulas and then placed in tombs or wells
(1991). The ﬁrst type of formula Faraone calls a direct binding
formula, as seen in “I bind NN.” The Greek rite described above uses
a similar phrasing: “I pierce her.” No direct binding formulas appear
in The Book of Secrets since so many of the rites are directed at angels.

The second type of formula Faraone calls a “prayer formula,” since

it asks the gods or daimons to undertake an action on behalf of the

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

speaker. This is the type of formula found in the Hebrew love rite: “I
ask of you, angels who rule the fates of the children of Adam and
Eve.” This is a minority phrasing in the text and is cast in politer
terms than the adjurations. The third type of formula described by
Faraone is a “wish” formula, such as “May NN be unsuccessful.” This
phrasing obscures the agent, leaving it ambiguous as to who exactly
is harming the victim. This type of formula is not found in The Book
of Secrets since it does not include the use of an angelic assistant.

Faraone’s fourth and ﬁnal form is a “similibus” formula. Here the

speaker uses a persuasive analogy such as “As this corpse is cold and
lifeless, in the same way may NN become cold and lifeless.” This
last category does not appeal to any power but is based on a passive
formulation. We do ﬁnd a similar formulation in one section “Just
as a woman will return to the infant of her womb, so this N will
return to me to love me from this day” (1.146). The recipes in The
Book of Secrets are usually cast in more active formulations, though
many of them do use analogies. Most importantly, since the various
formulas appear in the midst of a majority of adjurations they
assimilate to adjurations and it is easy to read them without noting
their distinct construction.

The Book of Secrets is an implicit guide to the etiquette of late

antique request formulas. Requests must be directed to the
appropriate supernatural being, and in the appropriate language.
None of the prayer formulas are addressed to the main deity, who
does not have the task of dealing with the topics addressed in the
rites. Nothing is asked directly from the occupant of the seventh
heaven; the language of choice in the seventh heaven is praise.

The verbal formulas ﬁll many roles in the rites. In addition to

directing the angels, they incorporate the power of divine names
into the rite. Sometimes the names may look at ﬁrst glance like a
string of nonsense letters. The string of letters “KOMPHTHO
KOMASITH KOMNOUN,” for example, is followed by “you who
shook and shake the world” (PGM 4.1323). Divine names most
importantly have reference (to the divine being) and not sense. All
divine names, therefore, and especially international divine names,
do not have to have any clear meaning. These names, far from being
nonsense, directly incorporate the power of the beings addressed
into the rite. The Greek rite incorporates the daimons in other ways
(using the daimon body parts).

Very few of the rites include only verbal formulas. Numerous,

sometimes rather exotic, objects are employed in tandem with the
verbal formulas. Some of these objects are employed in the rites

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

based on models of modiﬁed sacriﬁces. As discussed brieﬂy in
Chapter 2, the sacriﬁcial cult was increasingly understood in the ﬁrst
three centuries

to be the purview of daimons and not the highest

deity.

This was part of the general movement away from traditional

animal sacriﬁce that swept the Mediterranean world in the ﬁrst
centuries

( J. Z. Smith 1995: 22). Sometimes talk about sacriﬁce

replaced animal sacriﬁce in the well-described shift from Temple to
home/house of study. Other times the focus of the sacriﬁcial offering
shifted from the main deity to lower-level supernatural beings. The
cult was directed at the daimons and angels, attracting or placating
supernatural ﬁgures just as ancient sacriﬁces had done for centuries
before. Daimons are said to be “riveted” to “burnt-offering” and
blood (Origen, CC 8.62); they “delight in frankincense and blood
and the odors rising from burnt sacriﬁces” (CC 4.32).

Just as the daemons, sitting by the altars of the Gentiles, used
to feed on the steam of sacriﬁces, so also the angels, allured by
the blood of the victims which Israel offered as symbols of
spiritual things, and by the smoke of the incense, used to
dwell near the altars and to be nourished on food of this sort.

(Origen, DePr 1.8.1)

This stunning statement of Origen’s was probably borrowed from
Jewish reinterpretations of sacriﬁce traditions.

Daimon sacriﬁces

are also mentioned in rabbinic texts, including casting bread into
the sea for the daimon known as the Prince of the Sea (

myh r>

Daimon sacriﬁces were not the full-ﬂedged animal offerings known

from the Hebrew Scriptures and early Greek literature. Substitutes
of herbs, animal parts, or even rocks were used instead. The altar was
a smaller and therefore more portable version of the ancient altars
( J. Z. Smith 1995: 26).

The rite might take place in numerous settings, including a

private house, the side of a river, near a tomb, or, as in many cases,
in a place which is completely unspeciﬁed. In all these cases the site
is sanctiﬁed by the ritual itself ( J. Z. Smith 1995: 26).

The Greek rite employs a ﬁgurine, as do other rites in The Book of

Secrets, though not the love rite.

These objects are particularly

disturbing to modern sentiments. Except for a small sub-set of
objects (crosses, menorahs) the material dimensions of ritual are
often relegated to the fringes of expression. The most suspect are
images of humans, often described as “voodoo” dolls, and statues of
gods.

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

Even in the writings of art historians images are often presented

in terms of decoration, and not for their more dramatic cultural
roles. Ancient suspicions about images reinforce “the long-standing
valorization of the spiritual over material form” (Freedberg 1989:
60). It is all too easy to overlook the fact that, among their many
social roles, statues “could detect unchaste men and women, protect
one against bugs, avert calamities, and generally perform in a whole
variety of beneﬁcent ways” (Freedberg 1989: 92).

Ancient and modern polemics concur on this issue. Hebrew

Scriptures connected statues with idolatry and the worship of false
gods.

These prohibitions divert attention from long-standing

traditions of depicting the deity in the form of a bull and members
of his entourage in various hybrid animal forms.

Greek religious

practices included a variety of roles for statues. Prayers were offered
to statues; they were bathed, clothed and carried in processions.
Even as these practices developed they were critiqued (Xenophanes,
DK 21 B 15–16). Roman religious practices included both the use
of small statues in family rituals and larger statues in public cults.

In the ﬁrst three centuries, images were widely employed in

rituals. While stereotypes present Jews as eschewing images and
Greeks as embracing them, the evidence is more complex. Prayers
were offered to statues as they had been in the past (Dionysius of
Harlicarnusses 8.56). Sometimes divine presences were invited into
statues. Neoplatonic writings describe the placing of herbs and
stones inside statues as part of rituals which manifested divine
presences.

While Biblical polemics against images were repeated in

later Jewish texts, the history of Jewish art is richer than expected at
every turn. Plants, animals and even images of humans were used in
synagogue art, mosaics in public and private settings, on tombs, and
on smaller objects such as jewelry.

Jews, Christians and pagans agreed that statues could be animated

by supernatural presences. The nature of these presences was subject
to debate. Were they really divine presences or simply the tricks of
daimons?

While not as strident and consistent as the Hebrew

Scriptural texts, Greek and Roman texts critiqued the use of statues
and presented “barbarian” practices as aniconic and therefore praise-
worthy.

The tractate Asclepius from the Corpus Hermeticum warned

that daimons may implant themselves in statues as a means of
fooling gullible people (24,37). Maximus, who animated a divine
statue via hymns in the presence of the young Julian (350s), is
called “a theatrical miracle-worker.” His mode of operation is
contrasted negatively with “puriﬁcation of the soul which is

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

attained by reason” (Eunapius, VitaPhil 475). These critiques may
have been fueled by an old anti-iconic stance.

The hostile attitude towards the use of statues was in full force

when the nineteenth century deﬁnitions of magic were developed.

According to James Frazer’s famous interpretation of the “voodoo
doll,” the person using the doll in a magic ritual mistakenly thought
that the harm inﬂicted on the doll was directly mimicked in the
intended victim. In this model “magic” is based on the misguided
analogical laws of “contagion” (once connected always connected)
and “like leads to like” (harming a doll is harming a person).

There is no evidence, however, that people engaged in such

actions cannot differentiate between sticking a pin in a doll and
harming a person. Most participants would not claim that the simple
act of binding a ﬁgure in and of itself is enough to bind a woman. The
analogical actions are embedded in complex rituals, which in turn
depended on culturally speciﬁc notions of supernatural forces.

A more fruitful way of thinking about the role of ﬁgurines in

rituals such as the Greek love rites is to begin with the observation
that rituals are a very special type of cultural activity. Every ritual
act is a copy of a model established by a god or a founding ﬁgure of
the religious tradition (Parmentier 1994: 128–34). When Israelites
rested on the Sabbath, they copied the deity who rested on the very
ﬁrst Sabbath (Gen 2:1–3). The rabbinic celebration of Passover re-
enacts an ancient rabbinic retelling of the Exodus story. Every
Eucharist is a copy of the model set by Jesus when he instituted the
rite, no matter what the particular interpretation of the rite is.
Roman sacriﬁces were traced back to the actions of the founders of
Rome, Romulus and Remus, and the ﬁrst king, Numa.

In each case a ritual recreates in the present actions which

happened in the past. The actions themselves are special in that they
involve deities or some type of supernatural forces. The divine forces
at work in the rituals are presumed to be effective, since the actions
in the past were successfully completed. That is, the rituals re-enact
the effective past actions of deities. The derivative rites are then
successful to the extent that their “excessive formality” harkens back
to the action which they copy (Parmentier 1994: 130). In order to
be a successful copy of the successful action, the rite must have a
clear structure which follows the speciﬁc guidelines of the past.

Rituals are models in yet other ways. They include in themselves

exact copies of their goals. A marriage ceremony includes in itself a
model of a completed model; the vows delineate the perfect
marriage. Sometimes the models are created in the midst of the

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

rituals via speech which outlines the model in detail for the
participants (honor, love and obey). Sometimes these models are
presented via actions and objects, such as the modeling of the
destroying of enemies by including an exact model of the act of
destroying. They do not represent in an arbitrary manner what it is
they stand for; instead they have the identical form of what they
stand for.

A statue, in semiotic terms, is a very special kind of

representation of a human since it has the exact same form as a
human.

Binding a ﬁgure is then a particularly close model of the exact

action sought in the love rite. When the model of binding is
combined with the formula that includes the person’s name, the
binding action is directed towards that speciﬁc person (and only
that speciﬁc person). The “standing for” model of binding is
formally related to what it stands for at yet another level if it
includes an actual piece of what (who) it represents (the person’s
sweat, hair, nail-clippings etc.).

Amulets, used in numerous settings including the exorcism

discussed in the previous chapter, also materially represent divine
forces. Hundreds of amulets are preserved from the ﬁrst centuries,
now located in museums and private collections.

Millions more no

doubt perished due to their small size and the materials they were
made out of. Amulets were made out of precious metals, stone,
animal parts, vegetable or mineral matter and just about anything
else that can be engraved or put in a small sack. They were tied on
arms and hands, placed on people’s doorposts, hung on animals and
buried near houses and buildings. Ancient portraits show them as
part of daily attire. Amulets contained Biblical verses, Homeric
verses, angel names, incantations, strings of letters, and, sometimes,
small drawings.

Amulets predate the ﬁrst three centuries

, with thousands

found in archaeological digs and others mentioned in literary texts.
Aristophanes’ Plutus describes a man who shrugs off a blackmailer
by pointing out that he has a protective ring (883ff.). Biblical
verses, including Deuteronomy 6:4–9; 11:13–21 and Exodus 13:10,
11–16, command the Israelites to bind the deity’s statutes on their
hands and on their foreheads. These verses, and sometimes the
Decalogue, as in the examples found at Qumran, were written on
small pieces of parchments, placed in small boxes and then bound
on hands and on the head.

The exact implementation of the verses

may have varied in different Jewish communities; the Letter of
Aristeas refers simply to wearing symbols on one’s hands (159).

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

Wearing or hanging amulets was standard practice among Jews,

Christians and Greco-Roman believers in the ﬁrst centuries.

The

particular nuance of amulets from this time period is their inter-
national ﬂavor, with names and motifs from a variety of traditions
and settings. The makers of these objects hoped to draw on all
traditions which had the reputations of being powerful and ancient,
hence the Egyptian and Jewish elements.

Rabbinic texts discuss numerous types of amulets, including an

ornament in the shape of a reptile (tAZ 5.2). In rabbinic circles it was
ruled permissible to wear an effective amulet even on the Sabbath
(mShab 8:2). Amulets were forbidden to Jews only when they made
use of the wrong supernatural powers, such as the amulets mentioned
in 2 Maccabees 12:40 which had the names of foreign gods on them.

Amulets are best deﬁned by their use. That is, amulets are any

objects used to directly mediate between divine forces and a speciﬁc
individual or place. They work by bringing some type of physical
representation of the supernatural force into direct physical contact
with the person/animal/place for which aid is sought. An amulet
functions much like a blessing said over a person, only in this case it
represents the forces of blessings in material form and physically
connects them with the individual.

This physicality of the “blessing” is again a stumbling block, as

many modern researchers are more comfortable with spoken prayers
than their material representations. As in the case of the ﬁgurines,
the problem of material objects is that they appear to themselves
become the focus of human concern. “Idolatry” is present when the
statue/amulet/scroll and not the forces that it represents are thought
to heal and protect.

In our love rites the verbal formulas and the use of objects rein-

force the presence of the divine forces in the rite in numerous
overlapping ways. Angels are called on by name, invoking their
presence in the rite. Their names are also literally embedded in the
rite by means of the lists of names on the lead tablets. In the Greek
love rite, body parts of a daimon are bound onto the statue, a very
direct representation of divine force in the rite. The molded image
is also put in contact with the supernatural forces when it is placed
in the grave. The angels, in turn employ other cosmic forces, using
the natural forces of the planets to accomplish their task.

In order for the binding spells to be successful they must be kept a

secret from the people towards whom they are directed.

addition, other rites were thought to be so ancient and powerful they
could not be divulged to anyone. This theme echoes in the very title

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

of The Book of Secrets and in the repeated exhortations against
revealing the rites found throughout the Greek Magical Papyri.

We noted at the start of the chapter that rites like our love rites are

among the last to be freed of the polemical label magic. In terms of
goals, mundane concerns such as making a woman fall in love with a
man appear too petty or not spiritual enough to be part of religion. So
too cursing rituals do not seem to ﬁt into the proper bounds of
religion.

These are, of course, highly selective notions of religion.

Looking for material gain, cursing, condemning and generally
thwarting enemies were all part and parcel of ancient religious prac-
tices. The intimate and inseparable connection between curses and
blessings is demonstrated in the Hebrew Scriptures where the two are
a special category of speech. Both types of speech work automatically
and cannot be taken back since they have automatic efﬁcacy.

If evil

could not be cast in the way of others, neither could good.

Once suspect goals are eliminated as a reason for classifying the

texts as magic, we are left with the major concern of the methods
used in these texts. Any use of a divine image or even a divine name
threatens to lead people into thinking that the image or name is the
object of veneration in and of itself and not due to its special
relationship to the powers it represents. Any of these rites, taken
out of their contexts, easily looks like “magic.” Once the context is
lost, the complex “standing for” relationships that they entail are
perforce lost and it looks as if the models themselves are supposed to
supply the efﬁcacy and supernatural power.

Just as legal language sounds like nonsense to the uninitiated,

people outside of the implicit social contract can intentionally or
accidentally malign any of these rites. It is easy to impute that the
amulet’s user thinks that the amulet itself really is the god, and thus
to accuse him or her of idolatry or magic.

Freedberg rejects as confusing the attempt to classify all the

instances where art has a relationship with its context of use as
“magic” (1989: 80). The term has limited explanatory value. So, too,
no religions in the ﬁrst three centuries functioned without some type
of physical or material representations of divinity in their rituals,
even if, as in the case of the rabbis, it was a name or a scroll. Just as
the primordial model of a ritual is present formally in the ritual and
the goals as well, so, too, some word or object must have a formal
relationship with some divine force, or a ritual would be nonsensical
action. Every part of the love rites was carefully constructed to ﬁt
into contemporary notions of cause and effect – especially cause and
effect where angels, daimons and gods were concerned.

A N C I E N T R I T E S F O R G A I N I N G L O V E R S

USING NATURAL FORCES FOR

DIVINE GOALS

Maria the Jewess and early alchemy

In the 1980s the single best word to use when trying to sell just
about anything was “natural.” This word tapped into the public
imagination in such a powerful way that it endorsed everything
from food items to shampoo. Notions of “natural” [Gr:

fusikÒj

]

were also important in the ﬁrst three centuries. An entire literature
about the forces of nature appears to have emerged in the last
centuries

BCE

, though most of the writings are known to us only in

fragmentary form.

We hear, for example, of Bolos of Mendes, author of lost treatises

“Natural Forces” and “On Sympathies and Antipathies.”

Pliny

recorded several marvelous tales from Democritus the Naturalist,
who appears to have written extensively about the animal world and
the forces of sympathy and antipathy (NH 8.59).

We also hear of

Anaxilaus, author “Natural Forces” and another treatise with the
intriguing name of “Dippings.”

References to these authors are

joined by others to Ps-Manetho, author of “On Natural Forces”
(second to ﬁrst century

BCE

and Nigidus Filigus who wrote on

grammar and theology as well as the natural sciences (ﬁrst century

BCE

This entire literature is lost and rarely mentioned in modern

scholarship. The ideas discussed in the treatises, however, had
widespread inﬂuence.

Ancient investigations of “natural” forces

helped individuals understand and put the forces to work.

Decades ago Nilsson struggled to ﬁnd a way of characterizing

these ancient usages of “natural” and relate them to the late antique
cosmology. He wrote

Human beings, the lower animals, plants, stones, metals, were
all conceived of as the carriers of mysterious forces which had
the power to cure sickness and suffering and to procure men
riches, good luck, honor, and wonderful potencies. . . . The

R E C T O R U N N I N G H E A D

very word “physical” in later times commonly meant an occult
property or potency.

(1948: 105)

“Occult” leads us towards magic. Elsewhere in the same article, how-
ever, Nilsson likened the forces to modern notions of gravitation and
chemical afﬁnities (1948: 109). These comparisons set up connec-
tions to modern scientiﬁc thinking. Many of the sayings attributed
to naturalists remind us of scientiﬁc discourse more than occult
ideas, such as the statement preserved in the Geoponica that the
“naturalists” say that beans harm the heart (Geoponica 2.35.3, p. 179).

Many of the writers on natural forces (Bolos, Democritus and

Anaxilaus) are implicated in the rise of alchemy. Pliny mentions, for
example, a treatise by Democritus called “Artiﬁcial Substances.”
This term appears in later alchemical texts where it seems to mean
metals produced by technical arts.

We have no citations from

Anaxilaus’ treatise but the title “Dippings” refers to a process
employed ﬁrst in jewelry making and metallurgy and then in
alchemy. Alchemy, which emerged in the ﬁrst three centuries,
presents a rich example of ancient imagining about unseen forces,
an example which has confounded modern scholars.

The term alchemy is itself medieval;

in the ﬁrst centuries

the

term Sacred or Divine Art was used instead.

Arts were found in

many areas of social practice, such as rhetoric, medicine and archi-
tecture (Barton 1994: 7). They included both theoretical investig-
ation and, most importantly, the practical application of the
theories.

The “Sacred Art” emerged in the ﬁrst centuries

as religious

thinkers borrowed the prestige and success of the technical arts,
setting up their pursuits as parallel enterprises. They adapted state-
of-the-art metal working techniques to their own goals, creating a
new mode of practical instruction with far-reaching theoretical
underpinnings. “Stealing” metalworking techniques was similar to
modern attempts to prove that penicillin and other recent scientiﬁc
discoveries are already encoded in the Bible, thereby rubbing off on
the text some of the enormous prestige science currently enjoys.

While the early techniques were familiar from other social con-

texts, the focus of the Sacred Art was unique. It aimed at speeding
up the inherent changes which the natural world (including humans)
was thought to undergo. For alchemical practitioners, metals were
not static since the cosmos itself was not static. Regardless of each
metal’s status in the natural world and its place in the hierarchy of

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

the cosmos, every metal is on its way to becoming gold. The
alchemist speeds up the process, making the change happen within
a few hours instead of over generations.

The immediate goal of the complex alchemical procedures was to

impart a series of color changes to the metals; blackening, whiten-
ing, yellowing and then the most obscure, violet-making. Each
color signiﬁes how inspirited a metal is by revealing the spirit
(pneuma) of the metal; it indicates to the outside world the inner
nature of the metal (Forbes 1964: 140). Changes in color are indic-
ations of the inner changes the metals undergo as they work their
way up the ladder from the most earthly to the most heavenly.

The contributions of Maria the Jewess, which we will look at in

some detail, are preserved for us by Zosimos (late third/early fourth
century).

Maria is a remarkable ﬁgure, scarcely recognized in

modern scholarship despite the past decades of trawling for neglected
female ﬁgures.

The fragments of her writings are far more exten-

sive than those of male writers who are presumed to have been
historical ﬁgures, and they present a coherent set of concerns, as we
will see below.

The existence of early alchemical treatises attributed to a Jewish

woman is so surprising it is worth pausing for a moment to
consider why this is the case. Since so much of the diversity of
Judaism in the ﬁrst three centuries has been lost she seems like an
anomaly. It is unusual to ﬁnd references to Jewish women who
worked in esoteric traditions and were called divine. If we
depended on the history written by the rabbis, she would not
exist. While we do ﬁnd many titles associated with women in
synagogue and tomb inscriptions, such as “head of the synagogue”
and “mother of the synagogue” these titles do not point towards
the Sacred Arts (Brooten 1982).

Why then do we even have any remembrance of her? One of the

reasons is the trope in Zosimos that women know the secrets of
metals, discussed in more detail below. This trope appears to have
been more powerful than competing stereotypes about women.
Texts associated with the Sacred Art contain a number of references
to women; in addition to Maria we ﬁnd Theosebia, Zosimos’ “sister”
in esoteric study, Cleopatra and Thesis the Virgin. The Sacred Art
was sometimes in later texts called “opus mulierum/the work of
women,” not without some truth in the case of Maria (Forbes
1948: 24).

A second reason for the preservation of someone like Maria is that

female ﬁgures appear to have been viewed as legitimate conveyors

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

of special knowledge when there was a practical side to their
endeavors.

For now it is enough to point out that the very fact

that she worked with pots and pans and not in the realm of pure
dialectical thought may have helped make a place for her in the late
antique imagination.

Zosimos was an active practitioner and compiler of alchemical

treatises who was originally from Panopolis, but according to later
writers (Suda) lived in Alexandria.

Zosimos’ most famous work is

a series of 28 treatises dedicated to various divine ﬁgures, though he
also wrote other treatises.

Zosimos in turn quoted from the

writings of Maria, sometimes referring to a speciﬁc treatise such as
“On Furnaces,” but often citing her without giving a source. The
numerous citations from Maria found in Zosimos offer a portrait of
a practitioner with a distinct personality and intriguing set of
concerns. Maria was the technician’s technician, offering criticism
and improvements on accepted modes of operation, many of which
became standard practice for centuries after her. The high regard for
her writings is seen in numerous other writers besides Zosimos; a
later Arabic writer Al Habib stated “No philosopher has taught the
truth in clearer form.”

Maria is presumed to have lived in Alexandria as Zosimos did,

although there is no direct evidence at all. Her dates are subject to
dispute, the evidence again being scanty.

Zosimos refers to her as

an “ancient” while later alchemists thought she was the sister of
Moses.

The only treatises prior to Maria we known of are those of

Ps-Democritus, which are dated anywhere from the early second
century

BCE

to the ﬁrst century

The rich arguments Maria

engaged in demonstrate that she worked in a milieu with more
developed techniques than Ps-Democritus, placing her after the
compositions of these treatises. Some of the devices she adapted for
the Sacred Art appear to have been developed in the ﬁrst century

making it unlikely she wrote any earlier than the early second
century

. These include the distillation process in general and the

glass still in particular (Keyser 1990: 362–3). In addition, her name
is well represented in the list of Jewish women’s names from the
ﬁrst centuries as compiled by Tal Ilan (1989).

Zosimos preserved numerous citations from her writings since

Hebrews and Jews were cast as central ﬁgures in his history of the
Sacred Art.

There are two sciences and two wisdoms: that of the Egyptians
and that of the Hebrews, which latter is rendered sounder by

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

justice. The science and the wisdom of the best dominate both:
they come from ancient centuries.

(“The True book of Sophe the Egyptian and of the
divine Lord of the Hebrews [and] of the powers of

Sabaoth,” Ber 3.4/2.1)

Sometimes Zosimos cited traditions which were borrowed from
Jews without speciﬁcally attributing them to Jewish sources. His
extensive discourse about the three-letter name Adam (

cda

) “a

name from the language of the angels” doubtless came from Hebrew
exegetical traditions.

Similarly, Olympiodorus, who wrote after Zosimos, stated

It was the law of the Egyptians that nobody must divulge
these things in writings. . . . The Jews alone have attained a
knowledge of its practice, and also have described and exposed
these things in a secret language. This is how we ﬁnd that
Theophilus son of Theogenes has spoken of all the topographic
descriptions of the gold mines; the same is the case with the
description of the furnaces by Maria and with the writings of
other Jews.

(“On the Sacred Art,” Ber 2.4.35)

According to Zosimos’ letter to Theosebeia, his “sister” in the Sacred
Art, the ancient sacriﬁces of the Hebrews were preﬁgurations of the
Sacred Art. He advised Theosebeia to copy the sacriﬁces which were
recommended by Membres to Solomon, promising her that if she
can copy them, operating in this manner she will obtain the proper,
authentic, and natural tincture.

More speciﬁcally, and most importantly in regards to Maria,

Zosimos repeated the popular story that knowledge of metal-
working came down from heaven by means of angels who revealed
it to Jewish women.

The ancient and divine books say that certain angels were
taken by passion for women. They descended to earth and
taught them all operations of nature. As a result, he [Zosimos]
says, they fell and remained outside of heaven, because they
taught men all that is wicked and of no proﬁt to the soul.
These Scriptures also say that from them the giants were born.
Their initial transmission of the tradition about these arts
came from Chemes. He called this book the Book of Chemes,
whence the art is called “chemistry.”

(Syncellus, Ecloga Chronographia 23.9–24.12, Mosshammer)

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

It is impossible to know where Zosimos found this widely-
circulating legend.

Since the Jews were not known for revealing

their secret knowledge, turning to Jewish women was one way of
gaining access to the traditions.

Any texts attributed to Jewish women must have had a special

resonance with him. Among these in turn Maria was his favorite; he
calls her “divine.”

Maria also saw her rituals as having a special

connection to Jews. She warned, “Do not touch it with your hands.
You are not of the nation (genos) of Abraham. You are not of our
nation.”

The notion of not touching is reminiscent of Biblical

concerns about purity where touching could convey uncleanness.
The restrictions give the procedures an aura of sacrality.

To locate Maria’s speciﬁc contribution we must backtrack to the

techniques used in metalworking and the alchemists prior to her.
The ﬁrst stage is “blackening” which created matter in its most
embodied state, representing the very bottom of the scale of nature.
At this stage the metal has no qualities except fusibility, which was
the only quality necessary for moving the matter upward on the
bodily scale towards greater liquidity.

The alloy was then subjected to the second stage, “whitening.”

This stage appears to be the same process used, for example, for silver
making in the Ps-Democritan text (Forbes 1964: 14). The metal
could be whitened by fusing tin or mercury to it, or by adding a
small bit of silver called a “ferment.” By these methods it was possible
to “whiten” a mess of metal with only a small amount of “white.”
While this alloy would only be white on the outside, the fact that the
inside was yellow would not have troubled an alchemist.

The third stage was yellowing, again identical to the gold-

making procedures of the earlier texts such as Ps-Democritus.
Fusing could be done with gold ferment this time, or the metal was
yellowed with “sulphur/divine water.”

The sulphur water had to

be produced before it could be employed and seems to have been
made somehow from lead. The special water was used because “it
produces the transformation; by its application you will bring out
what is hidden inside; it is called ‘the dissolution of bodies’”

The

resulting yellow substance could then turn other substances yellow.

The ﬁnal and most obscure stage is

iosij

: “purple-tincturing,”

perhaps making the amalgam purple or violet or perhaps simply
cleaning it and taking away the rust (Hopkins 1934: 97–8; Taylor
1949: 49–50).

This step produced a “tincture of gold” which

was believed to be the essence from which more gold could be
produced. Zosimos explains, “It is the tincture forming in the

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

interior [of the gold] which is the true tincture in violet, which has
also been called the Ios of gold” (“The Four Bodies,” Ber 3.19.3).”

Variations on these techniques appear in the main source for pre-

Marian technique, the writings by Ps-Democritus. Similar tech-
niques also appear in the earliest extant texts associated with alchemy,
two papyri which appear on the surface as handbooks for metal-
workers (Leiden X and Stockholm) but whose recipes do not look as
if they will succeed.

When we turn to the excerpts from Maria preserved in Zosimos

we ﬁnd an explosion of technique accompanied by numerous new
devices and instruments. Unlike Ps-Democritus, for example, her
writings include the vocabulary of transmutation and the addition
of techniques of distillation. Understanding Maria’s citations involves
mapping a plethora of objects: furnaces, lamps, water baths, dung-
beds, reverberatory furnaces, scorifying pans, crucibles, dishes,
beakers, jars, ﬂasks, phials, pestles and mortars, ﬁlters, strainers,
ladles, stirring rods, stills, and sublimatories (Taylor 1949: 46).

Maria’s contributions are diverse; in the main she elaborates on

and reﬁnes the pre-existing four-step procedure of changing the
color of the metal.

She brags, for example, that her process for

“blackening” is better than that used by others. Her copper and
sulphur mixture is superior to the metal of magnesium since it is
black all the way through and not just on the surface.

Maria invented new devices to be used in these procedures. One

device is even named after her, the “balneum Mariae” or water-bath,
still used today for the slow heating of chemicals. The device is a
form of double boiler. The substance to be heated is placed in an
inner bowl, which is then placed in an outer container ﬁlled with
water. It is unlikely that she invented this procedure (or all of the
other procedures that are associated with her), but she may well
have been the ﬁrst to develop its use in the Sacred Art.

Besides the water bath, we also ﬁnd an ash bath (thermospodion).

For example, Maria states “Take the sulphur water and a little of the
adhesive, put it on the hot ash bath, for thus they say among
themselves that the water is ﬁxed” (Zosimos, “On the Sacred and
Divine Art,” Ber 3.11.1). Here again she is adapting a widely used
device. The ash- or sand-bath, another of her devices, was well
known from Greek and Roman doctors who used them to prepare
their medicines and from the cookbooks of the period, for instance
that of Apicus Coelius.

Maria is also closely associated with distillation devices, that is,

with devices that collect some form of distillate into a receiving

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

ﬂask via a tube.

With distillation, the relationship between means

and ends is altered from earlier techniques. Simply put, distillation
can accomplish many ends but metalworking is not one of them.
Sulfur, for example, which is frequently mentioned in this regard,
cannot be distilled (Taylor 1949: 45).

It is signiﬁcant that distillation was used only for treating and

coloring metals and not for the more successful uses to which
distillation can be put, such as making alcohol. Distillation was
particularly suitable for Maria not because it worked but because
the technique ﬁtted her overall strategy of making solids into
liquid. Producing steam was a model of the general transformation
from earthly to heavenly she sought.

A variant on the still associated with Maria is the tribikos, which

has three separate arms for collecting distillate.

Another device, a

kerotakis, gets its name from the term for an artist’s palette used for
holding the pigment while painting.

The pigments (white, black,

yellow and red) were mixed with wax on the kerotakis and were
then ready for use. In the Sacred Art, the kerotakis was put inside a
still, to hold the metals to be treated. The still was set up in such a
way that the vapor rose in it, already in a modiﬁed state, and then
fell upon the substance resting on the kerotakis. Since the still was
made out of glass, it was possible to see the metallic substance
inside change color as it reacted with the special vapor.

The processes for which these devices were employed are

described using a variety of Greek verbs, the particular nuances of
which are sometimes hard to determine, but which all refer in some
way to the distillation process. “Sublimation” (

ekfnsaw

) appears to

have been a sub-part of the distillation process, with “sublimed”
vapors being used to treat the metals by distillation. In a discussion
on “metallic bodies” Maria complains about prior technique: “She
wished to show that we do not sublimate well” (Ber 3.12.1). The
sublimation process leads to a preliminary result of “shadowless”
copper and gold. “‘Sublimate vapors,’ Maria says, ‘until the sulphur-
ous substance volatilizes (

Ȓᒎȟȍᒎȓ) with the shadow (which obscures

the metal) and copper with no shadow will be produced’” (“On the
Substances,” Ber 3.12.7).

The point of being shadowless is that it

is on its way to losing its bodily substance.

The basic change to which all of these procedures is directed is

transforming the metal from the state of having a body to not hav-
ing one. Maria states, “If the corporeal is not rendered incorporeal,
and the incorporeal corporeal, nothing that one awaits will take
place.”

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

If we have only a vague understanding of the processes she advo-

cates, we have even less of a clear sense of what these procedures
were performed on. Much to the chagrin of modern scholars, the
Sacred Arts employed their own nomenclature for metals. Basic to
the esoteric nature of these texts is a secret language of metals.
Metals as we know them cannot affect other metals; only when they
are treated do they become agents of change. The ideology of
“ferments” points to the special properties of the metals employed;
none of them were the same as their mundane counterparts. Every-
thing has its own nomenclature.

“Our lead becomes black,” Maria

explains, “while common lead is black from the beginning.”

Maria’s techniques are preserved without extensive theological

introductions or commentaries. We do ﬁnd some important ideas
outlined in Ps-Democritus’ only extant text, “Physical Things and
Mysteries” (

fusik4 kaˆ mustik£

This text begins with formulas

for dyeing cloth purple and then switches abruptly into a narrative
about Democritus’ search to learn how to “harmonize” nature. His
search ends dramatically with the revelation of a phrase engraved on
a pillar in a temple: “Nature rejoices in nature and nature conquers
nature and nature masters nature.” This cryptic saying implies that
natural processes can be used to change nature, to overcome nature.

This is a very optimistic view; the means for getting beyond the

natural world are available in the natural world. Based on this
premise it is necessary to learn everything possible about the natural
world since all answers are contained in it. If nature conquers nature,
natural processes will ultimately lead to the cosmic changes sought
by religious practitioners. This positive attitude to the natural world
is striking and is crucial to the development of the Sacred Arts.

Zosimos also articulated a theology of alchemy, drawing analo-

gies between transforming metals and redeeming humans. These
analogies align the Sacred Art with tropes of the ﬁrst man’s fall
into the body, of his resulting subjection to Fate, and of striving to
transform nature and thereby ascend beyond the body to the
immortal world of the spirit.

For Zosimos, becoming incorporeal

is a means of overcoming Fate (“On the Letter Omega,” section 7).
But in his version these tropes do not become standard “dualistic”
thinking with a starkly negative valuation of everything on earth
and a positive valuation only on heavenly existence; instead they
retain a more positive attitude towards the natural world since it is
in fact changing and changeable.

From the ancient view these pursuits were driven by the same

model of ancient divine wisdom which motivated so many of the

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

rites discussed in the chapters above. Just as some of the rites in The
Book of Secrets can be understood as modiﬁed sacriﬁces, the work over
alchemical ﬁres was also understood to be a derivation from ancient
sacriﬁcial practices. Unlike the rituals from the handbooks, these
rites appear to have been completed in silence. This lack of verbal
formulas is not as surprising as it might seem at ﬁrst, since many
ancient sacriﬁcial practices appear to have been carried out in
silence.

Modern attitudes towards these rites are highly ambivalent.

Writers on natural forces have come to embody both magical and
scientiﬁc thought in modern eyes. “Alchemy proper began,” a recent
article states, “when a neo-pythagorean [i.e., Bolos] applied magical
notions of sympathy and antipathy to the Egyptian techniques.”

Anaxilaus is labeled a magician in numerous modern studies,
following Wellman’s classic study (1928).

Exactly what kind of a

threat or annoyance Anaxilaus posed to the authorities is unknown.
It is assumed that he was expelled from Rome by Augustus in 28

BCE

because he was a magician.

Yet, at the same time, investigations of “natural” forces represent

from the modern viewpoint the origins of scientiﬁc thought.
Alchemists employed metals in highly technical ways and so have
an aura about them of being more scientiﬁc than many of the rituals
we have examined so far. Much recent scholarship on alchemy is the
product of historians of science for whom it represents early
scientiﬁc thought.

During the ﬁrst three centuries explanations based on natural

forces were explicitly excluded from notions of magic. Origen, for
example, described the “natural” effects of Jesus’ death. This “natural”
explanation helps us begin to understand what is too complex for
most people.

For it is possible that there is in the nature of things, for certain
mysterious reasons which are difﬁcult to be understood by the
multitude, such a virtue that one just man, dying a voluntary
death for the common good, might be the means of removing
wicked spirits, which are the cause of plagues.

(CC 1.31)

For Origen, other deaths, including those of martyrs and even
Jephthah’s daughter had the same “natural” effect. Knowledge of
“natural antidotes and prophylactics” such as the instinctual use of
fennel by serpents is also by deﬁnition not magic (CC 4.86).

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

Christians may only learn after death “the reasons certain properties
are associated with certain roots or herbs, and other herbs and roots,
on the contrary repel [or avert]” (DePr 2.11.5).

A Jewish-inﬂuenced prayer in “The Eighth Book of Moses” in the

Greek papyri (PGM 13.154) states “Your natural name in Egyptian
is Adlabiaeim.”

Morton Smith translates the term “natural” as

“magical,” annotating it “with power to produce tangible effects.”

A better translation than Nilsson’s “occult potency” and Smith’s
“magical” might be “naturally powerful.” This translation points to
the mysterious and powerful forces in the world which effect its
operations but which are obscure to the average person. The name
“Adlabiaeim” seems to have special efﬁcacy based on its natural
relation to a supernatural power. So too, daimons respond “naturally”
to their names according to Origen (ExMar 46).

Alchemical pursuits attempted to model natural processes, the

slow natural changes which transform every part of the cosmos. The
attitude towards the natural world reﬂected a synthesis of traditional
locative themes, clinging to a positive evaluation of the natural
world, but combined with a strong desire to reach utopian, other-
worldly goals. As such, they sought to transform all of existence.
Natural forces are not directly visible to the eye. Claims to employ
these forces are likely to elicit the same skepticism as do claims to
employ supernatural forces. The demarcations between natural and
supernatural can also be confusing since, as we have seen, in ancient
views, what we call supernatural forces work “naturally.” Imposing
modern notions of “magic” on these intricate ideas clariﬁes nothing;
neither the gods nor nature work by magic. Perhaps the most
important point is that we recognize the ancient attempts to
demarcate a category of “natural” and to use it to explain the
workings of the world, including divine forces. The greater one’s
knowledge of these forces, the more dramatic interventions could
be. It was possible to imagine transforming the cosmos while
working with a handful of the lowest earthly matter.

U S I N G N AT U R A L F O R C E S F O R D I V I N E G O A L S

DIVINE POWER,

HUMAN HANDS

Becoming gods in the ﬁrst centuries

Israel is called gods because it is written: I say, “You are gods.”

(Tanhuma Qedoshim 37.5 on Ps 82:6)

The name of gods is given to them [Christians], for they will be
enthroned along with the other gods who are set ﬁrst in order
under the Savior.

(Clement, Strom 7.10)

An integral part of imagining magic is imagining the ﬁgure of the
magician. Numerous ﬁgures were denounced as magicians in the
ﬁrst three centuries. Some are well known to us, such as Jesus,
Apollonius of Tyana, and Apuleius; others are more obscure, such as
Theudas known only from a single reference in Josephus (Ant
20.97).

One approach to investigating the ﬁgure of the magician would

be to run through the points developed in Chapter 1 and tick off
the reasons why someone might be labeled a magician. He (or she)
might have harmed someone (even when trying to help), belong to a
socially liminal group, or be presumed to operate via evil powers.
These individuals were threats because of the amount of power that
they were thought to wield.

The central question to be addressed in this chapter is not to

retrace the contours of these charges but to ask the general question
of how much access humans were thought to have to divine power.
The power of the person charged as a magician seems anomalous to
us unless we locate it within the context of the general sweep of
power attributed to humans in the ﬁrst three centuries. The mirror
images of holy man and magician both depended on social concep-
tions of what kinds of supernatural power a human could employ, or
be.

V E R S O R U N N I N G H E A D

In the older visions, both Greek and Hebrew, the major barrier

between humans and gods was that humans were destined for
miserable existences in Hades or Sheol after their death.

In both

Homer and the Hebrew Scriptures unhappy shades in the under-
world lament their bleak existence. “Triumph over death is one
achievement denied to humanity,” Sophocles stated ﬂatly (Antig 361).

With the rise of notions of the afterlife, this distinction was no

longer so clear. Among the earliest notions of an afterlife to appear
in Jewish texts was belief in astral immortality, that is, eternal life
as a divine star (Cumont 1949). The book of Daniel predicts that
“wise leaders shall shine like the bright vault of heaven, and those
who have guided the people in the true path shall be like the stars
forever and ever” (Daniel 12:3). Similar claims are found in Wisdom
of Solomon 3:7 and in 1 Enoch 104:2.

Post-death divinization as a star articulated with the idea that

humans might be divine beings on earth. From a few early references,
such as the claim that Empedocles was a god on earth (DK B115,
B119 p. 356, 359), this idea became much more widespread. Morton
Smith identiﬁed ﬁve individuals who were considered supernatural by
their followers in the ﬁrst century

(1965: 743). These ﬁgures

blurred the line between human and divine in a manner which would
have been shocking in the older locative worldview.

In his succinct manner Nock stated, “to put on immortality was

in Greek tantamount ‘to become a theos/god’” (1951: 215). The
equation of gaining immortality and deiﬁcation was true in the
minds of some Jews and Christians, as we will see below. Without
either becoming THE deity or the focus of worship, humans could
make the dramatic change from earthly to divine existence.

In the ﬁrst centuries

the notion of deiﬁcation “was often ex-

pressed with a boldness which surprises moderns who have been
brought up to think of the category of divinity as inﬁnitely remote”
(Nock 1951: 214). These claims go against modern stereotypes of
Judaism and Christianity, or monotheism generally. The very idea of
deiﬁcation is thought, incorrectly, to smack of polytheism (Lattey
1916: 257).

In Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman texts the transformation

of a human into a divine being was thought to be effected by a
stunning variety of techniques and combinations of techniques:
burial, a vision of the deity, an ascent through the heavenly realm,
being a vegetarian, and being drenched in blood, dipped in water,
or drowned in the Nile.

In order to understand how these rituals

emerged we will begin with the ﬁrst hints of deiﬁcation of humans

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

in Jewish texts (ﬁrst century

BCE

) and then consider the “routiniz-

ation” of these techniques in the later centuries.

The emergence of deiﬁcation techniques

Deiﬁcation via ascent and hymn-singing in Jewish texts

Rich language about the transformation of humans into divine
beings occurs in several places in the texts found in the Qumran
library. These texts, composed just before and at the beginning of
the time parameters of our study, include many images of the fusion
of humans into the heavenly chorus and cult. The image of a
heavenly liturgy goes back to Isaiah’s report that the seraphim recite
“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his
glory” (6:3) and Ezekiel’s mention of divine praise (1:3). The
heavenly cult, richly developed from these few Biblical references,
superseded the earthly one in endless Jewish texts from the Qumran
scrolls to rabbinic texts.

The Qumran texts such as Songs of the

Sabbath Sacriﬁce (4QShirSabb) detail the heavenly priesthoods along
with other participants in the heavenly cult and the heavenly
temple (based on Ex 25–31, 35–40).

The shift in location of the cult from earth to heaven confused

many of the older locative categories. Humans and deity no longer
met only in the earthly Temple. Now participation of any type in
the cult involved ascending to the heavenly realm. The Qumran
hymns describe a merging of selected humans into the heavenly
chorus, giving the humans a new and much elevated status.

These

human priests observe the angels of the divine presence, which
means that they now function up in the heavens. The hymns do not
claim that the humans surpass the highest angels who are still
described as superior.

Nor does the text explicitly state that

humans are now divine beings; the implications of merging with
the angels is left unarticulated.

Later rabbinic texts will more

explicitly place humans above angels.

Qumran Scroll Blessings (1QSbs) offers a priestly blessing which

explicitly merges humans and angels. The prayer exploits the
priestly blessing in Numbers 6: 24–6, extending and redirecting it
towards a new goal.

May the Lord bless you . . . and set you as a splendid ornament
in the midst of the Holy Ones . . .

(3.25–6)

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

May you be as an angel of the Presence in the holy Abode for
the glory of God of hos[ts]. May you attend upon the service
in the Temple of the kingdom and decree destiny with the
angels of the Presence, [and may you be in] common council
[with the holy ones] for eternal time and for all everlasting
ages.

(4.25–6)

While the Biblical blessing channeled the deity’s blessing to an
individual via a priest, (“May the Lord cause his face to shine upon
you”), here the blessing transforms the priest himself. The priest is
both the speaker and the object as the blessing cycle recycles the
divine power of the blessing towards his own transformation. The
power of the blessing and its efﬁcacy still comes from the deity, but
the manner in which it is channeled through the priest heightens
the status of the priest himself. He is part of the heavenly class of
beings who attend upon the divine cult.

Another Qumran collection of hymns, Songs of the Sabbath Sacriﬁce

(4QShirSabb), is structured such that the singing of hymns traces the
reciter’s ascent from the earth through each ascending section of the
heavenly court to its inner core.

The text contains intricate descrip-

tions of the angelic cult in heaven; uttering each level of description
marks the reciter as having arrived at that speciﬁc level of the
heavens. Traversing each level is by deﬁnition an ascent, since the
location of the cult is in heaven and the person sings the hymns is
clearly now “there” as well. The implications of this ascent are not
made explicit; that is, it is not clear whether the human has under-
gone some type of experience which has permanently changed him.

Another scroll (4QMa), a variant reading of the War Scroll,

describes an individual who becomes one of the “elim/gods” (M.
Smith 1990). The phrase “I shall be reckoned with gods and estab-
lished in the holy congregation” appears to describe a transform-
ation of an earthly being into some type of divine being. This brag,
as Smith pointed out, makes more sense coming from someone
originally mortal than from an angel. The text gives us no hint of
exactly how someone merits being counted among the gods.

All of these texts share the emphasis on ascent to the heavenly

world found in numerous contemporary texts such as the Enoch
literature. In the Apocalypse of Abraham (ﬁrst to second centuries

?), for example, Abraham recites a dense list of divine praises

(Eternal one, might one, Holy El, God autocrat) taught to him by
an angel and thus arrives in the seventh heaven (17:2–19; 19:4–6).

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

The Qumran texts, however, locate ascent not as a literary theme
connected to long-dead ﬁgures, but imagine an active participation
in the life of the heavenly realm as available to at least some
individuals.

Very near in time to the composition of the later Scrolls from

Qumran, Philo also described the role of hymn-singing in ascent.
Scriptures do not say where Moses was buried so Philo imagined
that Moses did not die but instead was “translated” from the earthly
sphere to the heavens. At his death Moses rose through the sky
singing hymns and leading the other cosmic elements in song (Vita
76–9).

If only this text survived we would lack any clear idea of what

happened to Moses, just as we must guess about the transformation
of those who sing the Qumran hymns. Other texts of Philo,
however, describe Moses’ divinization much more clearly. Scriptures
state that the deity made Moses “as a god before Pharaoh”; Philo
read this line as a literal statement about deiﬁcation. Moses’
prophetic mind “becomes divinely inspired and ﬁlled with God,”
evidence that “such men become kin to God and truly divine”
(QuesEx 29; cf. SacAbel 9). The holy soul is divinized

by ascending

through the heavens beyond the world to where there is “no place
but God” (QuesEx 40).

Since the matriarchs and Moses’ wife, according to Philo, had

supernatural conceptions based on divine paternity, their children
(and thus the children of Israel) were semi-divine to begin with.
Ascent in this case is a return to an original home base. Imagining
that humans can become divine is intimately connected with the
notion that some humans are not simply human to begin with.

In all these texts we see the pressure from the utopian cosmology

to make the higher realm accessible to humans. At the same time
some humans may turn out to have been divine beings in human
disguise, for whom death was not a barrier.

Roman deiﬁcation by burial and cremation

Worship at tombs was an ancient practice in both Roman and Greek
cultures (M. Smith 1983: 96ff.). Plutarch reminded his readers that
the Romans honored the tombs of their fathers “even as they do the
shrines of the gods, they declare that the dead person has become a
god at the moment when ﬁrst they ﬁnd a bone” (RomanQues 14).
These practices ﬂourished in the ﬁrst three centuries

. Epitaphs,

often hard to date, but known to be from the period of the empire,

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

evince a rich variety of notions about post-burial deiﬁcation.

Clement of Alexandria derided his non-Christian neighbors for the
number of tombs they worshipped (Protrep 3).

A special form of immortalization was reserved for children who

died young, a practice commented on in Jewish and Christian
texts.

Wisdom of Solomon 14:15 mocks the grief of a father for

his dead son whom he “now honored as a god what was once a
human corpse.” Despite ironic, even hostile, portrayals in these
sources, similar reassurances that their children were living happily
as immortal ﬁgures in heaven also circulated in Jewish and
Christian circles. While some thought that the untimely dead,
including children, were destined to roam the earth as trouble-
causing daimons, others were sure that children were more likely
than most to ascend to the highest reaches and live among the gods.

In the late ﬁrst century

BCE

, the Romans were debating the

divinization of Julius Caesar (Price 1987).

These debates and the

rituals of deiﬁcation that evolved in the next century, point to the
growing acceptance of the notion that a human (or at least an
emperor) could become a god even while alive. Not only was the
person deiﬁed, but the individual was also worshiped, that is,
expected to intervene on behalf of supplicants.

The question of whether Julius Caesar was considered a god in his

lifetime is a source of modern debate, just as it was during his
lifetime (North 1975). One of the few extant contemporary witnesses,
Cicero, clearly felt that Caesar received honors inappropriate for a
human. These honors included putting a statue of Caesar in the
Quirinus temple and carrying a statue of him along with one of
Romulus-Quirinus in the festival procession.

After his death Caesar

was awarded “couch, image, pediment, priest,” that is, all the
accoutrements of a divine cult.

While Cicero found these moves

offensive in relation to Julius Caesar, he was willing to conceive of a
human (Pompey) as an angel sent down to humanity from the gods,
much like Philo’s Moses.

He used the term

¢pÒq1wsij

: “deiﬁcation”

in his attempt to honor his daughter after her death. Cicero ordered a
shrine built for her and not a tomb, hoping to “get as close to
deiﬁcation as possible.”

His desire for divine honors for his daughter

carried none of the political implications that divine honors for Caesar
did, but it required a similar view of human possibility.

The funeral rituals of the Roman emperors were a particularly

dramatic publicizing of the deiﬁcation of humans via cremation.
The three main descriptions of the deiﬁcation-by-ascent rituals for
Roman emperors, two by Dio Cassius

and one by Herodian,

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

share many elements. The rituals were modeled closely after the
funeral rites of Roman nobility at the end of the Republic. Just as in
a noble funeral, an efﬁgy of the body was displayed in the Forum to
a crowd of mourners who wore special dress. After a funeral proces-
sion, which included the display of masks of the ancestors, the dead
person was eulogized in an oration and the body taken from the
Forum and cremated. The scope and drama of the funeral of an
emperor was magniﬁed greatly from the model of the funerals of
nobles. Augustus was a new type of pater patriae with a larger
“family.” A greater range of ancestral masks was carried in the
funeral procession and a Senate decree in effect treated all women as
daughters or wives of the emperor (Price 1987: 63–5). A new
element, the release of an eagle from the tower where the efﬁgy was
burned, functioned as a concrete mapping or model of the transfer
of the emperor’s spirit to the world of the gods.

The divine cult apparatus was added in the form of divine honors

awarded to the dead emperor. These included priests and sacriﬁces,
as Price calls it, “the apparatus of divine cults” (1987: 58). These
honors, plus others, such as the absence of prayers offered on the day
in remembrance of the dead, made the worship of the emperor
similar to that of a deity and not a dead ancestor. The classic
narratives of Romulus’ and Hercules’ deiﬁcation by means of a
funeral pyre were enacted in the burning of the emperors’ earthly
bodies. The body needed to be destroyed since the common trope
held that bodies couldn’t ascend. Cicero, for example, stated that
the bodies of Hercules and Romulus did not ascend since what is
earth cannot leave earth (DeRep III.40).

The burning of the wax efﬁgy meant that there were no “human”

remains after the ritual whatsoever, and not even the bones left after
a cremation. This marked the sharp distinction between divinization,
which was not related to tombs or bodily remains, and the more
common worship carried out at the tombs of close relatives or
heroes and dependent on having at least one piece of the body.
Athenaeus preserved a fragment of Aristotle where he explained
that “If my purpose had been to sacriﬁce to Hermeias as a god, I
should never have built for him the monument as for a mortal, nor,
if I had wished to make him into the nature of a god, should I have
honored his body with funeral rites” (Deip 15.697a).

In the case of

divinization, the sequence of a funeral pyre followed by an eagle
release marks the stages of the ritual: the total destruction of the
body (or efﬁgy) followed by a sign that the divine part is now in the
heavenly realm.

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

Dio Cassius (45.7) uses the tantalizing term

¢paqanat…xw

“deify” to refer to this process.

In its earlier usages this term was

associated with exotic foreign groups who were thought to know
the secrets of immortality, especially the Thracians and their leader
Zalmoxis.

A healing song is traced to some of Zalmoxis’ physicians,

“who knew how to make someone immortal.”

Herodotus reports

the claim of the Getea, that they do not die, but go instead to
Zalmoxis (Hist 4.94). These people are referred to simply as “the
deiﬁers.”

We ﬁnd no hints in the early Greek texts as to how the

Getea became immortal. Such “deiﬁers” were thought primarily to
reside far from the center of Greek culture, though some sects
within the culture, such as the Pythagoreans, may have been
referred to by the same term (Linforth 1918: 27–8).

Strabo used the term in his description of an incident where an

Indian, whom we are told was wearing only a loincloth, came
bearing gifts to Caesar. He threw himself onto a burning pyre in
order to “immortalize” himself. The inscription marking this event
reads: “Here lies Zarmanochegas, an Indian from Bargosa, who
immortalized himself in accordance with the ancestral customs of
Indians” (Geo 15.1.73). Dio Cassius talks about the same incident,
which clearly impressed the Romans, wondering whether the Indian
threw himself into the ﬁre alive in order to make a display to
Augustus or because it was a tradition in his culture (54.9). With
Dio Cassius the term is speciﬁcally associated with the transforming
funeral pyre of the emperor cult; thus with the cult of the emperor
the term “immortalize” moves from Thrace to Rome, from an exotic
philosophical minority or the act of a near-madman to the literal
center of town. Josephus’ claim that the Essenes “immortalize” the
soul is evidence that such claims could reasonably be made about a
Jewish philosophical minority and were even likely to bring them a
certain prestige (Ant 18:16–8).

As exaggerated as the divine honors given to Julius Caesar may

have seemed to Cicero, Augustus’ funeral points to a routinization
of these ideas in the ﬁrst century. It signiﬁes the general acceptance
that burning funeral pyre plus ascent was a mode of divinization.
This model presented the emperor as a mediating ﬁgure between
human and divine, setting up the emperor and his family as semi-
human/semi-divine beings.

It is hard to imagine that such a con-

crete, and in many ways simple, model of deiﬁcation did not reinforce
the possibility that others could attain the same fate. The slippery
slope leads ﬁrst to the deiﬁcation of relatives

and lovers of the

emperor. The most famous case was Hadrian’s lover Antinous, who

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

drowned in 130.

Since drowning in the Nile was thought to be a

form of deiﬁcation, his claim to divine status was doubly reinforced.

Numerous coins and statues of Antinous dressed as Apollo and other
divine ﬁgures are evidence of the widespread cult dedicated to him.

The Senate itself became ofﬁcial “deiﬁers” since the deiﬁcation had to
be ratiﬁed by one of its members.

The self-immolation of some of

Otho’s soldiers on his funeral pyre may have been an attempt to
extend the deiﬁcation process to witnesses of the ritual.

In the Roman evidence no single pattern of divinization emerged,

even among the emperors and their families. Some individuals were
deiﬁed only outside of Rome, as in the cult of Antinous. Others
were depicted as gods only on more small-scale private commemor-
ations such as a gem. A small cameo, for example, depicts the
apotheosis of Germanicus, adopted son of Tiberius. Germanicus sits
on the gem on an eagle as Victory crowns him with a wreath
(Richter 1968: 120).

The rich imagery of deiﬁcation-through-burial articulates with

the development of pseudo-burials, though many of the references
to these rituals are hard to date precisely.

Paul describes baptism

as a means of participating in Christ’s death, burial and resurrection
(Rom 6:3–4). Apuleius tells of a symbolic death and rebirth in his
Metamorphosis where he is buried and then raised to a new life (Book
11).

According to a very complex description in Proclus, one

ritual involved burying a participant up to his neck, since his head
was the only part of him which was already immortal (ThPl 4.9
p.30 l.17). The rest of the body would be made immortal by this
pseudo-burial.

A deiﬁcation ritual found in the Greek papyri exploits the same

model of a pseudo-burial (PGM 4.153–285). Here the text instructs
the practitioner to lie down naked under a sheet wrapped “like a
corpse” (4.176). He then recites a series of “I am he” formulas,
identifying himself as a companion of the god. The appearance of a
sea hawk who strikes the man with his wing is a sign that the
participant can claim to the god that he has “been united with your
holy form.” As a result he returns with a “godlike nature” (4.220).

Deiﬁcation techniques in early Christian texts

The rise of early Christianity offers new kinds of evidence about
deiﬁed humans, including theological texts which spell out the
concepts more clearly than any Roman writings did. Early Christian
texts evince a wide variety of stances on the basic idea that the deity

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

became a man in order that people could in turn become divine.
Language of commonality with divinity appears, for example, in the
New Testament (2 Pet 1:4).

The vague language of the New

Testament does not tell us anything about how one becomes divine.
Other texts point us to speciﬁc aspects of the life of a Christian
which enable the transformation; some of these are general modes of
life and some are speciﬁc rituals.

General language of deiﬁcation for those who live a good

Christian life runs through many early Christian texts. For Justin,
the Word “by his instruction makes mortals immortal, makes men
gods” (Orat 5) and “only those who live near to God in holiness and
virtue are immortalized (

¢paqanat…zesqai

)” (1Apol 21). Theophilus

of Antioch explicitly argued that it is possible to gain the reward of
immortality by keeping the commandments and thereby becoming
a god (Autolyc 2.27).

The possibility that humans could become gods, or equal to

the angels (

„s£ggeloj

), was particularly important to Clement of

Alexandria (Strom 7.10, cf. Butterworth 1916). Humans are all
created in the image of the divine in that they possess a mind which
is already divine. They must learn to cast off the ways of the body
and through their discipleship to Christ, learn to live a life without
any human passions. They can, therefore, “practice here on earth the
heavenly way of life by which we are deiﬁed (

™kqeoÚmeqa

)” (Paed

1.12). Hearing the scriptures and attending to the truth it is “as if a
god is produced out of a man” (Strom 7.16). The human soul
“practices to be a god (

melet´ eŒnai qeÒj

)” (Strom 6.14).

Clement cited Psalm 82:6 – “I say: You are gods” – more than

once as proof of the deiﬁcation of Christians. In the Stromates he
interpreted the verse as meaning that humans will become gods if
they throw off the passions of the body as much as possible (Strom
2.20). Elsewhere the same verse is used as proof of a complex pro-
cedure from baptism to enlightenment then to adoption into the
divine family, perfection and ﬁnally deiﬁcation (

¢paqanat…zw

) (Paed

1.6).

In addition to leading the right kind of life, knowledge can also

deify, since heavenly teachings bestow the boon of making a man
into god (

qeopoiîn

) (Protrep 11). Clement reminded his readers that

Socrates called a dialectician a god. Thus everyone who contem-
plates Platonic Ideas lives “as a god among men” (Strom 4.15).

Many of Clement’s statements have implications for understand-

ing Christian rituals since they become the vehicles for deiﬁcation.
The transformative role of baptism, for example, is familiar from

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

Paul (Rom 6:3–4) and thus from Jewish circles. Gaining
immortality by means of a dip in a font of water is mentioned, for
example, in an inscription from the ﬁrst century

from the Ino-

leukothea cult in Asia Minor. Farnell, who wrote on this cult,
argued that a reference to resurrection in the Minyah legend of Ino-
leukothea developed into a ritual of rebirth (1916). The myth was
acted out in a ritual dip in a fountain which functioned as means of
deiﬁcation (¢poqewqeˆj ™n tù l1bhti: “divinizing in the fountain”).

Ascent techniques routinized

The technique of singing hymns to ascend through the heavens and
thereby be deiﬁed reappears in a variety of later ritual texts (third
century and beyond). The use of hymns may have been so popular
because it reﬂected both Scriptural models and the Greco-Roman
trope common since Plato that songs (epodai/carmina) have tre-
mendous power.

In the middle of the second century, a father–son team of Juliani

presented themselves as specialists in practices which lead to
deiﬁcation. The fragmentary Chaldaean Oracles associated with the
father–son team claim that the person who engages in the special
practices will be part of the angelic order (Fr. 137,138). The Oracles
include tantalizing references to initiations, puriﬁcations and
consecrations. While it is probably a mistake to reconstruct a single
“Chaldaean” ritual from the surviving fragments of the Oracles, at
least one of them appears to have been a ritual of ascent (

¢nodoj

)

where the soul leaves the body and returns to its heavenly abode,
there gaining immortality.

With the help of angels, a worshipper is

able to separate his soul from his body by a process of breathing
techniques (inhaling the sun’s rays).

The Mithras Liturgy, found in an early fourth century Greek

papyrus,

follows a soul on a complex journey past the planets and

cosmic forces up to the highest heaven based on the recitation of
complex hymns. The Liturgy states clearly that the process confers
immortality; it includes an opening phrase “. . . for an only child, I
request immortality” (476), an invocation to “give me over to
immortal birth” (501), and a hailing formula which declares that
the reciter has become immortal (647).

The ascent begins with a hymn combining letter sounds with

creation imagery: “First origin of my origin, AEEIOYO, ﬁrst
beginning of my beginning, PPP SSS PHR[E]” (487ff.). Recitation of
letter-strings equated with cosmic elements incorporates their trans-

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

formative power into the prayers, much as angel names incorporated
their power into the rites in The Book of Secrets (“and the sacred spirit
may breath in me, NECHTHEN APOTOY NECHTHIN ARPI
ETH” (510)). The individual is then instructed to

Draw in breath from the rays, drawing up three times as much
as you can, and you will see yourself being lifted up and
ascending to the height, so that you seem to be in mid-air.

(539–40)

These breathing techniques, including the making of hissing and
popping sounds, enable the ascender to take off and begin his travel
through the cosmos.

He is able to see “himself” as he separates off

into two parts.

Once traveling towards the upper regions, the ascender tries to

pass himself off as a star, that is, as a natural inhabitant of the
heavens (570–5). The process depends in part on identiﬁcation,
with the individual literally re-deﬁning himself as a cosmic being
by reciting “I am a star” (574). Here beliefs about astral immort-
ality, now centuries old, are illustrated by the actual transform-
ations. As a ritual for immortalization, the Liturgy was probably
originally meant to effect such a one-time transformation. The
ritual has been re-edited and the outermost frame now relates the
ritual to divination.

The strategies used in the famous ascent

attributed to Rabbi

Nehunya in Hekhalot Rabbati (fourth to sixth century) emerged as
yet another variation on the theme of effective hymns.

This text is

part of the collection of esoteric texts referred to as hekhalot (palace)
or merkabah (chariot) texts which describe the heavenly cult with the
ﬁery angelic choruses and, the summoning to earth of various
angelic ﬁgures and transformation of humans into angels.

In this

case the hymns include direct citations of heavenly liturgy, numer-
ous divine names, and strings of letters from divine names.

The

primary “fuel” of the trip is still “talk”

as seen in the ascent in the

Songs of the Sabbath Sacriﬁce, but here the talk includes two
additional levels of efﬁcacy.

First, the hymns contain the exact

same words that the heavenly chorus recites. This mode of direct
citation fuses the human into the angelic unit more directly than in
the Songs. What the priests in the Songs watched and reported on the
heavenly chorus, the person who recites these hymns does. Second,
the use of the letters and sounds of the divine names incorporates
divine power into the hymns.

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

The goal of the ascent in Hekhalot Rabbati is a slippery question.

Among hekhalot texts, promise of immortality is found most clearly
in Merkabah Rabbah, which claims that it “will lengthen days to
eternal life.” Whatever its original goal, the ascent in Hekhalot
Rabbati has been re-edited into a new frame, exactly as the Liturgy
has, which promises that the ascent hymns will enable the practi-
tioner to “see the deeds of men” and know what the future holds.
Since divination is a less shocking goal than gaining immortality,
the re-editing of the ritual into the divination frames is a sort of
domestication.

In these ascent texts the dramatic elevation to heaven in the Songs

has become routinized; Rabbi Nehunya says that knowing the ritual
is like having a ladder in one’s home. He easily negotiates between
the earthly and heavenly spheres, leaving his body on earth while he
traverses the heavens. While he is not called one of the “elim” he is
an immortal being (son of the world to come) who straddles the
earthly and heavenly worlds. So too Proclus, according to his
biographer, ascended to the heavens at the age of 42 and found
them resounding with immortality (Marinus, VitaPro 28).

In addition to the general use of hymns in ascent, we ﬁnd

tantalizing references to the use of the Kedusha formula from Isaiah
6:3 in deiﬁcation rituals. The Cherubim recite this phrase when
they carry the divine throne, and thus the phrase was already
associated with being raised heavenwards in the Scriptural text.

The three-fold recitation of the term “holy” placed in the mouth of
the heavenly beings was considered the essence of heavenly liturgy.

Jewish texts composed in Greek connect the recitation of the

formula and divinization. The Christian Apostolic Constitutions, for
example, includes liturgy long recognized to be of Jewish origin
(Bousset 1979).

This early Christian liturgy preserves a Greek

version of the Kedusha which predates much of the extant Hebrew
liturgy. Having the text extant in Greek makes it easier to trace the
echoes of the Kedusha in other Greek texts.

Sections of this text parallel hymns recited in another Greek ascent

text, “Poimandres”, the ﬁrst text in the Corpus Hermeticum (Pearson
1981). The treatise is named after the revealing deity who speaks in
the text (Poimandres) and who is identiﬁed with the thrice-great
Hermes of Greco-Egyptian fame. By means of question and answer
the revealing god teaches the initiate the basics of cosmology, the fall
of man into bodily existence, and the ﬁnal ascent back to God.

The Jewish elements in “Poimandres,” including references to

Genesis 1–2, have long been noted.

The connection between the

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

hymnic ascent and the deiﬁcation is made explicit in several places in
the text, such as “This is the ﬁnal good for those who have received
the knowledge: to be made god” (Poim 26). At the end of the
Poimandres text, as the ﬁgure ascends from earth to heaven and
immortal life, he recites hymns which closely parallel the Kedusha in
the Apostolic Constitutions (Poim 31; AposCon. 7.34–5).

It is exactly

the recitation of the “holy” formulas which signal his ﬁnal deiﬁcation.

These Greek parallels help us interpret several cryptic rabbinic

texts. Tanhuma, for example, hints but does not explain that Israel
is called God, in the reference in Psalms “you are gods” because of
the Kedusha.

This reference makes sense to us as a highly con-

densed reference to deiﬁcation, much as it appeared in Clement of
Alexandria. A strikingly similar idea about name change connected
to deiﬁcation also appears, again in condensed form, in rabbinic
literature. Genesis 33:20, where Jacob builds an altar and calls it
“El-elohe-Israel” is interpreted as meaning that Jacob was called
“El”, that is a god, by the deity (bMeg 18a). A similar theme
appears in the midrash where Jacob claims that just as the Lord is
the lord over all heavenly things, he is the lord over all earthly
beings (GenRab 79.8).

Philo’s striking claims about Moses, that he was a divine being in

human form, became more widespread not only in Christianity but
in Jewish texts as well. A fragment of the Jewish text “Prayer of
Joseph,” preserved for us by Origen, revealed that Jacob was really
an angel of high rank who was sent down to earth ( J. Z. Smith
1978b: 24–66). So, too, a Jewish prayer in the PGM asks “Fill me
with wisdom, empower me, Master . . . because I am an angel on
earth, because I have become immortal” (7.7).

At the same time, by the end of the ﬁrst three centuries Philo’s

technique of closing off the senses to permit the human mind to
reconnect with its divine source became a cliché in later philo-
sophical texts (Mig). Language of deiﬁcation via dialectics is woven
through the various tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum. The eleventh
tractate argues that the path to deiﬁcation is to realize that the
entire cosmos is within oneself (CH 11.20).

The fourth tractate “A

Discourse of Hermes to Tat” simply states that humans must choose
to hate their bodies so that they can love their mind, which is part
of the divine realm. Choosing to be engaged in the divine realm
rather than the mortal one makes a human into a god (CH 4.7).
Tractate 13 uses the language of being “born again” (CH 13.1, 3, 10
and passim), instructing the student to “leave the senses of the body
idle and the birth of divinity will begin” (CH 13.7).

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

All of these rituals and the ideas they reﬂect were contested in

the ﬁrst three centuries. Christians who were engaged in power
struggles rejected claims to divinity made by their opponents. Thus
Irenaeus railed against Christians who claimed special knowledge
and considered themselves equal with the gods (AdHaer 4.38). Some
rabbinic authorities argued so distinctly against the notion that
people can become divine it disguises the fact that some individuals
within their own communities believed in this idea.

Despite opposition, ideas about deifying humans even before

death continued to circulate in later centuries. Clement’s claims
were repeated by later Christian writers, including Hippolytus.

The role of the Eucharist in deifying the participant is clearly
spelled out in Ps-Dionysius. Scriptural references to humans as the
image of God (Gen 1:27ff. and 9:6) are discussed in rabbinic texts
in terms reminiscent of the statues of rulers found throughout the
Roman Empire. These statues were understood to be the closest
copy to divinity on earth, and thus were used by the rabbis to
reinforce the similarities between humans and the deity (M. Smith
1958: 478–9). Men have the same form of divinity, all the way
down to the mark of circumcision, and they share his name and thus
his glory (bBabaB 75b). Rabbinic literature also contains several
dramatic statements about the human use of power that articulate
closely with the elevated status of humans resulting from deiﬁcation
rites. Moshe Idel has drawn our attention to the rabbinic texts
where individuals are able to either increase or decrease the
Godhead. The midrashic interpretation of “through God we shall
act with power” (Ps 60:14) is “In God we shall make power.”

Such

statements show rabbinic thinking on its way towards the later
Kabbalistic Jewish doctrine of “making God” discussed by Idel
(1988: 188–9).

Being born again, a second time, in a birth which makes one a

son of God or of the world to come, remains a crucial part of later
Christian and Jewish beliefs. The ﬁrst birth is from a woman, and
thus ensures nothing. The second birth, initiated by a priest or a
rabbi, is the birth to eternal life. The range of deiﬁcation rituals was
astounding. The act of lying down or being buried and imitating
death is equivalent to the statements in the Liturgy where the
practitioner’s body is being remade and to the discourse about being
born-again in Corpus Hermeticum. In the ﬁrst three centuries these
ideas were not interpreted as vague metaphors, but as goals the
appropriate rites could effect.

In The Book of Secrets joining the heavenly chorus co-exists with

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

all sorts of other rites, located literally on top of them in the seventh
heaven. So too in the Greek Magical Papyri rituals for gaining
immortality are edited together with numerous other concerns.
Becoming a heavenly being is not qualitatively different from other
concerns, so the texts impute. In the ﬁrst centuries, using human
hands to employ divine power was always to some extent putting on
the image of the deity. In some cases the rites effected not only the
world around the practitioner, but the human hands themselves
were completely transformed.

B E C O M I N G G O D S I N T H E F I R S T C E N T U R I E S

“EVEN THE DECENT WOMEN

PRACTICE WITCHCRAFT”

Magic and gender in late antiquity

No matter where we look in the history of accusations of magic and
witchcraft, women are over-represented. From denunciations of
Biblical witches to modern Halloween cartoons, women take center
stage. Since the imaginings about magic most often come from
men, it is no surprise that women are so consistently the targets. It
is tempting to see in these charges classic Freudian projections by
men of all that they fear onto women. In those cases where we do
ﬁnd more men charged than women, we also ﬁnd the particular
social circumstances that made men, at least temporarily, more than
women, the target of social hostilities.

Women are so often the

targets of these attacks that we wonder for a moment whether this
is one of those cross-cultural truths in which anthropologists
delight.

Lest we leave this topic at the level of simple stereotypes we will

examine one set of accusations made against women in the ﬁrst
three centuries

. Our test-case is rabbinic literature, which, while

it was redacted over several centuries (third to seventh centuries

contains many ideas which come from the ﬁrst three centuries.
These texts offer us such grandiose rhetoric about “women who
engage in witchcraft” that it takes the breath away.

While men are

theoretically as capable of indulging in magic as women, the gender
skewing in accusations and rhetoric is striking. In an exegesis
stunning in comparison to any remark about women and magic
found in an oral culture, the Biblical verse “You shall not permit a
witch to live (Ex 22:18)” is said to refer to a female ﬁgure since
“mostly women are engaged in witchcraft” (bSanh 67a).

This attitude runs all the way from the Mishnah, the core

document of rabbinic literature edited mid-third century to much
later rabbinic texts. Witches appear and re-appear in numerous texts

V E R S O R U N N I N G H E A D

from the Mishnah’s concern that increase in the number of wives is a
cause of increased witchcraft (Hillel mAvot 2.7) to the statement
attributed to Simon b. Yohai that “even the decent women practice
witchcraft” (jKid 4.11). Women represent a constant set of worries
throughout their lifecycle; fathers must worry that their young
daughters will be seduced and that old women will engage in magic
(bSanh 100b). Between these stages women were likely to be
suspected of poisoning their husbands, or attracting them in the
ﬁrst place via strange potions.

It is dangerous to use discarded

foodstuffs found by the road, since the daughters of Israel engage in
sorcery (bErub 64b). Crossroads are an inherently suspicious place
where supernatural spirits are likely to lurk. Given this, two women
seen together at a crossroads were deemed likely to be engaging in
witchcraft (bPes 111a). The fact that these women are in a public
space and not a domestic one makes them suspicious.

This assemblage of quotations is somewhat distorting. Collecting

quotes from the vast corpus of rabbinic texts edited over several
centuries does not convey the whole picture about attitudes towards
women. The rabbinic anecdotes speak with many voices and view-
points on any topic, including women. The range of rabbinic opinions
about and attitudes towards women is a subject of intense current
debate. The point here is not to see the extent to which rabbinic
texts preﬁgure modern feminist concerns. Interested readers can, for
example, contrast Daniel Boyarin’s claim that rabbinic recognition
of female sexual desire reﬂects a more positive conceptualization of
women then expected (1993) with Tal Ilan’s comment that positive
attitudes towards sexuality should not be equated with positive
attitudes towards women (1996: 14). We should also not expect
ancient sensibilities to match ours, since they will not, as Peter
Brown has pointed out in his studies of ancient attitudes towards to
the body (Brown 1998: 30). The limited task here is to look more
closely at how at how statements about witchcraft and women come
to warrant the intense interest they do and the dramatic – one is
tempted to say paranoid – statements.

We have already seen that the Hebrew Scriptures closely associated

women with magic and witchcraft. The prime model for witchcraft is
the female practitioner in Exodus 22:18.

In other instances the

charge of witchcraft is combined with charges of prostitution and
illicit sexuality, reinforcing the suspicion of magic with the general
fear of female sexuality. Prophetic texts associate harlotry and magical
charms (Nah 3:4) while historical texts denounce women as harlots
who engage in sorcery (Jezebel in 2 Kings 9:22).

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

Women were especially vulnerable since they did not hold any

power in the Biblical religious institutions, such as the priestly
circles. The editors of the Biblical text claimed that foreign women
perverted Israelites’ religious traditions, making women a general
threat. To make matters worse, women had roles in ancient rituals
which came under attack in the Bible. Ezekiel 13:17–23 presents an
extensive prophetic diatribe against ancient practices related to the
dead where women would “hunt for souls” while wearing wrist-
bands and veils. Shifting attitudes to the dead led to the condem-
nation of these practices as magic, with the presence of female
practitioners, once accepted but now suspect, reinforcing that view
in later generations.

The most famous “witch” incident, and the only one in the

Hebrew Scriptures of any length which describes a female practi-
tioner at work, is the story of Saul’s request of the woman at Endor
to summon Samuel from the grave (1 Sam 28). This story is a late
addition by a Deuteronomic editor, projecting the ritual event back
onto the early kingship period (Schmidt 1995). The story ﬁnds its
closest parallels not in Canaanite practice at the time of Saul, but in
later Mesopotamian necromantic rituals (seventh century

BCE

). In

these rituals a ghost is questioned about the future for the purpose
of “predicting the outcome of war as well as the destiny of a royal
house” (Schmidt 1995: 118), exactly as is the case in the story about
Saul.

The Deuteronomic editor projected the later necromantic rituals

back onto Saul. All of this was done in order to cast aspersions on
the early king and to answer the question: What could he have done
that was so bad that kingship was taken away from him? Brian
Schmidt explains, “In the ﬁnal analysis, for the deuteronomic tradi-
tion, necromancy – more than any other rite – epitomizes the
abomination of the Canaanite in the history of Israelite kingship.”
And the coup de grâce is that Saul consulted none other than a
woman. The gendering of the event makes it that much more
shocking and degrading for Saul.

Greco-Roman culture also had its stereotypes of witches. While

the picture of the “magi” stemmed from the Persian priest,

an even

more negative picture of female practitioners emerged in the same
period (Gordon 1987: 80). Unlike the magi, the female ﬁgures had
no redeeming features. While magi were thought to have access to
ancient wisdom and a certain prestige, women are presented as
isolated ﬁgures who threaten both family members (and potential
mates) and the general social fabric. These women, who deal in

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

the realms of healings (root-collectors) and family disputes (love,
revenge), could not even claim to be part of ancient or complex
technical traditions. They worked within the realm of their family or
mercenarily for strangers on a “freelance” basis. References to them
are excluded from any scholarly investigations such as Theophrastus’
On Plants and its discussion of famous male root-cutters.

While both men and women used supernatural forces to gain

lovers, the literary portrayals of women’s actions are more likely to
speciﬁcally associate these actions with magic, witchcraft, human
sacriﬁce, rampant sexuality and other antisocial colorings. Theocritus’
Second Idyll describes at length a hostile and vindictive woman who
uses love incantations to lure back a wayward boyfriend, threatening
that she will kill him if it does not work. No doubt women did
engage in love rites, as did men. Love-rites as discussed in Chapter 3
were used for both wayward and uninterested spouses, as well as
attracting new lovers. The difference is the particularly negative
portrayal of women. Theocritus’ unhappy woman is planning to
murder her boyfriend. We look in vain for parallel and equally hostile
portrayals of men engaged in this action, though we know from the
physical ritual remains that ﬁgures bound in love recipes were often
women.

Medea, while not directly called a witch in the early texts, is

involved in all sorts of antisocial and destructive actions which
make it clear that women with supernatural powers are active threats
to everyone in their sphere. She effected her goals by illicit and
suspect means, but she is presented in such a way as to make her path
seem to be the natural one of women.

She is a full-blown fantasy of

femininity gone wrong. Hostile, vindictive and dangerous, she kills
her brother, poisons members of the royal family, and murders her
own children.

In general in Greek literature, Richard Gordon concludes, women

are depicted as a curse and essentially false. Summing up the hostile
imaginings associated with women he writes “Medea is an exag-
gerated version of this representation of women, dominated by
nature, false, scheming and dangerous: and magic is part of the
armory which gives this sex its power” (1987: 83).

Some of the most lurid prose in Greco-Roman literature is about

the women who, as in the story of Saul, are associated with raising
the dead. These unpleasant, often old and ugly, women live among
or consort with the dead and in general pervert all the standards of
civic society. Lucan’s portrayal of the Thessalian witch Erictho is
both vivid and repulsive (BelCiv 6).

Finding a corpse she “eagerly

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

vents her rage on all the limbs, thrusting her ﬁngers in the eyes,
scooping out gleefully the stiffened eyeballs, and gnawing the
yellow nails on the withered hand” (6.540–3). Lucan cast scorn on
Pompey’s son for visiting this witch, much as the Biblical editor
attacked Saul. The more loathsome she is the more loathsome his
request of her.

A variety of “human products” were no doubt used in numerous

healing rituals. Pliny describes potential uses of saliva, urine, hair,
sweat, the very ﬁrst menstrual blood, ﬁrst teeth which have fallen
out, the blood of gladiators, bones from the hands of criminals, the
tooth of a man killed by violence, the skull of a hanged man, and
women’s milk (NH 28). Some people believed in the efﬁcacy of
these items, and some other people no doubt tried to ﬁnd and sell
them. At the same time, all the doubts and discomfort as to
whether these items were both effective and ﬁtting for human use,
some expressed by Pliny, were projected onto women. The resulting
depictions of women collecting and using body parts are truly
disgusting, ﬁlled with corpses, bodily ﬂuids and ugly bodies.

Not surprisingly rabbinic anecdotes overlap very closely with

both the Biblical texts and Greco-Roman attitudes exactly on the
general suspicion that women are likely to engage in magic. As we
will see below, rabbis are also willing to adopt some distinct Greco-
Roman attitudes towards women which appear in some ways to
contradict their own ideas, but which assume special female powers.
In addition, women suffer in rabbinic literature from a double-
barreled vulnerability to the charge of witchcraft, since a rabbinic
slant is added to Biblical and Greco-Roman prejudices. In order to
understand the particular rabbinic slant, we must turn for a moment
to rabbinic methods of argumentation and place the witchcraft state-
ments in this context.

The Talmud is dotted with statements about the speciﬁc ability

needed by someone who wishes to serve on the Sanhedrin, the
Highest Court. One of the most famous is “No one is given a seat on
the Sanhedrin unless he can make the unclean insect pure from the
Torah” (bSanh 17a). At issue in our discussion is not so much the
historical Sanhedrin as the question of the qualiﬁcations of a
potential member.

This Talmudic citation is transparent to us. That is, the rabbis state

as clearly as they could that becoming an expert involves learning a
mode of argumentation. The student of the system must learn how to
join in these arguments just as becoming an expert in our legal
system involves learning the rules.

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

This system contrasts greatly with the Biblical strategies even

when it overlaps in content. Scriptural purity laws declare a set of
ﬂuids and the people emitting them unclean by their very nature
(along with a number of other types of objects animate and
inanimate).

Women’s bodily functions are unclean, and therefore

their exclusion vis-à-vis the cult “natural.” This system is not
directed at women, and menstruating women simply take their
place among other impure people and objects.

Women are unclean

in what seems a highly factual way; it is simply the way the world
works. The rules by which the classiﬁcation is made are not made
clear, much to the chagrin of modern scholars who try to understand
the basis for classiﬁcation.

The rabbis (among many) then reinterpret the Biblical purity

system in the face of shifting worldviews, historical realities and
the destruction of the Temple. It is not so much the details of the
rabbinic system that interest us, as the basic contours of their system.
It sets up complex methods for arguing about the classiﬁcation of
unclean/clean. Simply put, they conventionalize the impurity
system with rulings and rules, which must be mastered. Learning to
work with the rules epitomizes mastery. An expert in the system
can argue a case either way!

In this conventionalizing system women are excluded from

learning the rules whereby they might be able to declare themselves
clean. Similarly they cannot learn how to construct for their beneﬁt
the classiﬁcation of actions or people as magical, which is also
explicitly stated to be a criterion for joining the Sanhedrin.

We have already seen that the rabbinic system of classiﬁcation of

certain acts as magic had tremendous leeway in drawing lines
between the permissible and the impermissible.

Rabbinic anec-

dotes about females who engage in witchcraft demonstrate this
leeway and the double-disadvantage for women. The daughters of
Rabbi Nahman had the unusual skill of being able to stir a pot with
their bare arms (bGit 45a). This skill is mentioned with some
puzzlement that women should have such a skill, including a
citation from Qohelct 7:28 “One man in a thousand have I found,
but a woman among all those I have not found.” An appended story
recounts that these women were carried off into captivity where a
fellow Jew overhears them saying that they prefer their new
husbands and do not want to be rescued. This individual, when he
returns to the Jews, clearly states that their unusual power was
based on witchcraft. The women’s ability is not classiﬁed as
witchcraft until it has been thoroughly investigated. Only when the

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

women were found to be wanting as wives were they declared to be
witches. Perhaps the point here is that since the women were
attached to a rabbinic family the status of their deeds was an open
question, until their moral failings settled it.

Attitudes towards menstrual blood embody the over determined

attitudes towards women. That is, the rabbis are willing to make
use of any and even contradictory negative evaluations of menstrual
blood. Thus, while Cohen (1991) argues that the menstruant only
begins to be perceived as a real threat to those around her in the
sixth or seventh century, all the parts of the puzzle were already in
place in the ﬁrst centuries. The conventionalizing of the purity laws,
and the exclusion of women from the process, had been going on for
centuries. Menstrual blood, unlike other types of blood such as the
blood spilled during circumcision, is unclean (Hoffman 1996: 172).
The contagion of impurity was a constant threat for rabbis and the
limits of the contagion had to be discussed in detail.

In addition, along with the standard notions of impure menstrual

blood the rabbis appear to have borrowed attitudes towards men-
strual blood from the general culture. Numerous Greco-Roman
writers mention the special powers of menstrual blood. Pliny listed
all the powers of this blood as part of his discussion of a variety of
female ﬂuids that are thought to have special properties (urine, spit,
etc.).

Contact with it turns new wine sour, crops touched by it
become barren, grafts die, seeds in gardens are dried up, the
fruit of trees falls off, the bright surface of mirrors in which it
is merely reﬂected is dimmed, the edge of steel and the gleam
of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are
at once seized with rust.

(NH 7.64–5)

The power of menstrual blood can be put to work positively, as well.
According to Pliny, menstrual blood can be used to undo other
people’s spells (NH 28.70–1). Tacitus learned from ancient sources
that it could be used to get sticky bitumen off the bottom of boats.

The usefulness of women’s rags in averting hail crops up in Plutarch
(QuesCon 7.1–2).

Josephus tells us that it can be used to uproot a

particularly lethal plant used in exorcisms (BJ 7.180–5). For
Columella its most important task is to help with infested olives.
Infested crops can be cured by a menstruating woman who walks
three times around, barefoot, after which the vermin will fall to the

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

ground (RR 11.3.64). This idea is attributed to Democritus’ treatise
On Antipathies, taking us back to the natural writers discussed above
in Chapter 4.

Belief in the power of menstrual blood conveys a special power to

women in general. A woman even when she is not menstruating can
prevent a storm (NH 7.64) and even a female glance, in the right
circumstances, can kill (NH 2.17).

The rabbis knew of these ideas. Uses of menstrual blood by the

general public are hinted at in rabbinic texts that refer to menstrual
rags traded for their powers. The fame of Rekem for its menstrual
rags is taken for granted in a midrash which compares taking straw
to Afarayim with taking bloodstains to Rekem (Tanhuma Vayera
Buber 12). Most surprisingly is that these ideas appear side by side
with purity issues, even though they are at variance with them. A
ruling blithely declares that “All stains that come from Rekem are
clean” (mNid 7:3).

Idol-worshippers are exempt from the rules of

purity, thus their stains are not impure. These stains are classiﬁed
with other types of female blood which are not impure, such as
blood spilled in blood-letting, hymenal blood and blood from a
genital wound (mNid 1.7,1.9,10.1, bNid 17b). These ideas do
not explain the Rekem ruling, since it includes stains of Jewish
women, a confusion leading some early commentators to emend the
text (bNid 56b). Lieberman therefore argued that the Mishnah
was inﬂuenced by Greco-Roman ideas about menstrual blood
(1965: 102).

It is in this context – Greco-Roman notions of the power of

menstrual blood – that we must understand rabbinic claims that
seem at variance with their standard notions of impurity, how it
is conveyed, and its impact. None of their standard notions can
explain the striking claim made in the Talmud that a menstrual
woman passing between two men can kill them if it is the onset of
her menses or simply cause strife between them if it is the end (bPes
111a). Such a statement makes no sense in terms of rabbinic notions
of impurity.

We ﬁnd other instances when Greco-Roman principles seem to

be freely adapted to rabbinic beliefs about women and magic. In
two anecdotes a woman is held up by her tresses in order to
diminish her power, pointing to some type of belief in the chthonic
power of women. In the ﬁrst one, the story is recounted in such
a condensed version that it is impossible to make sense of the
story without ﬁlling in many gaps. A women is presumed to be
hindering a man from having children, and when she is hoisted up

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

by her hair declares that she cannot do anything since something of
hers is at the bottom of the ocean. The word for the missing object
is itself missing or repressed in the text; translations usually supply
a phrase such as “magical material.” The rabbi then retrieves the
missing item, whatever it is and the man, or presumably his wife, is
able to bear children (jSanh 7.13).

This anecdote intersects with a set of anecdotes about Simeon ben

Shetah who goes out to a cave to combat the 80 women living
there.

In some versions of the story the women are simply referred

to as women, in some they are speciﬁcally called “women who
engage in witchcraft.” Shetah defeats the women by bringing 80
men for them (this part of the story has clear sexual overtones), each
of whom hoists up a woman so that she loses her power. Shetah is
thereby able to hang them all in one day. In these two stories
women must be connected to the earth in order to have their power.

Women, in fact, have a great deal of power attributed to them in

these stories of conﬂict. They can change shape,

mirroring the

ability of daimons to take on the shape of animals. Women can cast
spells with their eyes, a skill some men also have (Pesikta 90b).
Rabbis and men in general must be equipped with all sorts of
formulas to recite when they encounter unknown women, lest they
fall under their power.

These rabbinic stories, dramatic as they are, fail to illuminate any

lost or repressed religious and social roles. As mentioned above,
what is called “magic” is sometimes the carrying on of older
religious rituals in the face of social and theological changes. Some
of the Biblical denunciations of witches may hint at actual religious
roles women fulﬁlled as, for example diviners. Jeremiah 7:18, for
example, denounced women who continued to worship the Queen
of Heaven long after the author thought such practices should have
ended. The denunciations help us reconstruct the lost practice.

For this type of evidence, the rabbinic anecdotes are disappoint-

ing. Rabbinic anecdotes imply that there were sisterhoods of witches
with their own hierarchy, ﬁgures such as the head of witches
Ameimar encountered (bPes 110a). But these groups seem very
ephemeral even in the anecdotes themselves. Most of the “witches”
whom rabbis confronted head-to-head are individual women, both
Jewish and non-Jewish, who they encountered and opposed in what
seem to be impromptu settings. A woman is refused a seat on a boat
and therefore curses a rabbi (bShab 81b). A Gentile woman curses
Rabbi Judah’s ship so that he has to put his clothes in water, thereby
partially fulﬁlling and thus averting the curse (bBabaB 153a).

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

The only possible social roles disguised in charges of witchcraft

are healing and midwifery roles.

A condensed story refers to “pry-

ing widows” who bring about the destruction of the world (bSota
22a). Among these is Johani daughter of Retibi, though no
explanation at all is given as to what she did. Rashi explains that
Johani was a witch who could delay the onset of childbirth in
women, and then offer prayers which would appear to bring on
labor.

It is very tempting to see some twisted reference to mid-

wifery in this anecdote.

In a number of anecdotes rabbis turn to female family members

for help with illnesses, help which borders so close on what would
be called “magic” in other circumstances that the permissive tone of
the anecdotes is striking. These remedies might include the food-
stuffs found in kitchens, the use of amulets and the recitation of
formulas or Biblical verses. In one set of anecdotes Abaye, for
example, reveals some of the cures advocated by his stepmother, and
even her antidote against witchcraft of seven garlands of garlic
(bShab 66b).

These women are permitted to show their knowledge since the

women are presented as family members, who operate within the
sphere of the family. Their cures can also be permitted under the
ruling that anything which helps people is not magic. They are not
presented as experts in supernatural knowledge in general but as
experts in how to deal with witches since they are of the same
gender. Their power is extremely limited. In one revealing anecdote
Rabbi Yohanan learns the ingredients for a cure for scurvy from a
matron and then, after promising her not to reveal the ingredients,
does so anyway. The story, which appears in several versions, has
more than one ending.

In one she chokes on a bone and dies and

in the other she converts to Judaism. The woman’s identity varies
from version to version – in one she refuses to heal on the Sabbath –
but the one constant is the theft of the cure by the rabbi.

While any woman who had a major religious role would likely be

denounced as a witch by the rabbis, the reverse is not true, that
every woman denounced as a witch was fulﬁlling some recognized
religious role. Evidence for long-lost religious roles of women is not
found in the rabbinic stories.

We do in fact ﬁnd a few cases of Greco-Roman women who were

experts in esoteric traditions and present the ﬂip-side of charges of
being a witch, though they take us past our central period of
interest. First to come to mind is Hypatia, the Greco-Roman
mathematician and philosopher stoned by a Christian crowd as a

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

witch. The case of another female philosopher Sosipatra, with a
happier ending, is recounted by Eunapius in his Lives of the
Philosophers 466–471 (mid-fourth century). Her dramatic story
begins when two men visit her family, and impressed by the
daughter, tell the parents that they are “initiates into Chaldean
wisdom” and that their daughter is “equal to divinity.” They are
revealed to be daimons and she is apprenticed to them for a period
during which they are her teachers. When they subsequently
disappear as mysteriously as they came, they leave her gifts
including garments, books, and mysterious items. She goes on to
live the life of a great philosopher (greater than her husband)
surrounded by a small group of disciples. She could predict the
future, bi-locate and “it was said that concerning the gods, nothing
happened without her being there to see” (470).

Maria the Jewess is the closest Jewish ﬁgure we have found to

compare to Hypatia and Sosipatra. She, too, may have had a small
circle of disciples who turned to her based on her reputation for
secret knowledge. Maria, in addition to being earlier than either of
these women, also worked with pans, ﬁres and complex mixtures of
metals. Perhaps the few exceptional women who were engaged in
primarily theoretical investigation only prove the point that women
are usually relegated to practical questions.

The crowd’s fatal imaginings about Hypatia were far from the

perceptions such women had about themselves. Maria the Jewess
and her complex distillation devices were so far from the worldview
of the rabbis that they do not even bother to denounce her. If a
decent woman is full of witchcraft, it is hard to imagine a suitable
term in their eyes for a woman who thought she could lay bare the
secret processes of the world and speed them on their way by
heating metals over a stove. Instead in rabbinic literature we remain
imprisoned in the fertile imaginations of the rabbis, where it is
equally dangerous to walk between two women, palm trees, dogs,
or, some say, pigs (bPes 111a). Pairs were generally thought to be
unlucky in the Greco-Roman world, and palm trees were thought
to be home to daimons. Women ﬁnd them classiﬁed with animals
such as pigs and dogs, placing them by nature and by convention at
a tremendous disadvantage. Biblical prejudices merge with Greco-
Roman ones, ﬁlter through rabbinic anxieties about women’s
unclean bodies and it is possible to see every woman as a potential
witch. These imaginings were not always acted upon, but they are
part of the artiﬁce of magic bequeathed to later generations.

M A G I C A N D G E N D E R I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y

CONCLUDING NOTE

The legacy of the

ﬁrst centuries

The point of this study is not that magic is simply another term for
religion. It is true that ancient practitioners considered much of
what modern scholars label magic to simply be their religion. But
this observation hardly begins to articulate the rich imaginings
about magic in the ﬁrst three centuries

, which deserve to be

examined in their own right.

Notions of magic were developed at length by numerous writers,

given detailed nuances and debated. From the minor theme of fraud
to the more threatening themes of cannibalism and murder, the
activities of magicians were understood to threaten society in general.
Witches might prey upon total strangers and innocent children, or
more close to home, unsuspecting family members.

Everyday life presented endless chances for getting caught up in

the magical powers of one’s opponents. In a rabbinic anecdote, a
woman complains that she has no power over certain rabbis since
they did not wipe themselves with a shard, kill lice on vessels or
untie and eat vegetables from a bunch (bShab 81b–82a). All of
these seemingly innocent actions might have made them vulnerable
to her powers.

With Pliny, we saw the tremendous plasticity of the term “magic”

as a space-holder for practices far from those originally associated
with the Persian priests. In a world in which the criteria for estab-
lishing the validity of a cure were thin, Pliny tried to differentiate
his material from a vast array of (in his eyes) fraudulent offerings.
Pliny reinforced the validity of his writings by denouncing both
doctors, who used their social status to gain wealth, and the “fraudu-
lent vanities” of the magi who mixed astronomy in their cures.

After “magic” was written into the Roman law codes, it would

have required an antiquarian bent to use the term with its more
ancient connotations. In most cases, as we saw above, it had acquired

R E C T O R U N N I N G H E A D

too many negative associations in Greek and later Latin literature
for the positive connotations associated with the ancient Persian
magi to survive.

The rituals we studied (exorcism, love rites, alchemy, and deiﬁc-

ation) all point to the importance of the ﬁrst three centuries. Ideas
which appeared only in embryonic form before the turn of the
millennium undergo tremendous development by the beginning of
the fourth century. Many of these rites echo much older ideas, such
as ancient notions of possession. They all, however, have distinct
connections with the particular setting of the ﬁrst centuries. They
all had an implicit gounding in the notions that on the one hand
life on earth is a series of intimate battles between good and evil
forces and on the other that it was possible for humans to achieve a
divine status, sometimes even while alive. Possession permitted the
daimonic forces to be bodily manifest on earth and then subjected
to personal defeat. Love rites in turn made use of ancient ideas about
sacriﬁce, now directed to the angelic and daimonic helpers whose
task it was to assist humans in their struggles. These rites could
draw upon a plethora of ideas about effective words and objects to
help ensure success. Alchemical rites turned nostalgically to the
natural world, yet also aimed at divine transformations. Deiﬁcation
rites drew new boundaries for human identity, enabling human
hands to “make power.”

After reviewing the evidence for Jewish witches in the Greco-

Roman period Tal Ilan concludes, “Actual witches we do not meet
at all in this period” (1996: 225). “Witch” was not a term of self-
identiﬁcation in the ﬁrst three centuries

, and given the gruesome

literary portraits of witches it is not hard to see why. It was a term
of fantasy, used in imaginative and usually hostile depictions of
women. The rabbinic system of conventionalization made it all the
more over-determined that women would be witches. Women could
theoretically have declared that they did magic only for the purpose
of study, but the paths to this kind of power were not open to them.

Overall the criteria used in classifying actions and beliefs as

“magic” were not tradition-speciﬁc; people from a wide variety of
religious traditions shared them. So too in each chapter we saw that
similar rituals were found in different traditions, with both similar
goals and means. Maria and Zosimos had more in common with
each other than with other practitioners within their own traditions.

Past scholars have diminished the importance of these parallels

by stressing that people were only borrowing magic, which was
understood to be degraded religion. These borrowings no longer

C O N C L U D I N G N O T E

look so degraded, and thus force us to rethink our notions of
religious boundaries. Nor was this an issue only in the general
populace where amulets reﬂected the international language of
power in the ﬁrst centuries. Elites from various settings put great
effort into keeping esoteric traditions away from both their par-
ticular hoi polloi and from competing elites. Numerous anecdotes
present various rabbinic ﬁgures as prodigious supernatural powers
in their own right, as was noted already decades ago by Jacob
Neusner (1969). As such, rabbis were in conﬂict with other ﬁgures
who, like themselves, wielded special power. Rabbis compete with
necromancers (bBer 59a), dream interpreters, the mysterious but
powerful “men of deed,” and, last but not least, women.

If we can no longer equate a certain set of rituals with magic, it

simultaneously becomes harder to separate out the normative from
the heretical. Normative religion needs to be broadly enough deﬁned
to include the early alchemical traditions as well as divinization
rites, and then also rites for success in love. Even those who rejected
the more dramatic rhetoric of divinization had as their ultimate goal
to become part of the heavenly, immortal world and not the earthly
mortal one; this is an inherent redrawing of the more ancient
human/divine boundary.

As to the practitioners, even though the texts are not clearly

labeled as the property of Rabbi X or Bishop Y, there is no doubt
that all sorts of religious authorities, some known to us and many
lost, made use of the various rituals described throughout this
study. These would not be instances of magic, since, as we learned,
authorities cannot – by deﬁnition – engage in magic. They can,
however, bless, curse, heal, exorcise, predict the future, and put
angels to work.

In 1999 the last remaining Jew in Kabul, Afghanistan was

charged with being a magician, playing out a stereotype set in the
ﬁrst centuries.

Jews have been vulnerable to all that comes with

being thought to have special, secret knowledge, and charges of
engaging in “magic” haunted Jews for centuries. The charges did
not continue to haunt pagans since their modes of religious
practices died out or were taken over by Christians. Pagan
practices adopted by Christians are still often mis-characterized as
the “magical” component of Christianity (Flint 1991). This too is
ironic, since the negative valuation of “magic” was originally a
product of Greek writers. They would be shocked and dismayed to
ﬁnd that Greco-Roman priests and philosophers came to be called
magicians by Christians.

C O N C L U D I N G N O T E

Ancient polemical stance continues in many guises, such as

comments that monotheism is by nature less hospitable to “magic”
than polytheism. Egypt continues to loom large in the modern
imagination of magic; just about any material object used in
Egyptian religious rituals is likely to be labeled “magical object” in
museums today.

The more we understand those imaginings, the better we are able

to trace their lingering impacts today and decide if these are
imaginings we wish to embrace.

C O N C L U D I N G N O T E

100

NOTES

Introduction

1 For accusations connecting ritual murder and magic see also Cicero,

inVat 6.14 and Pliny, NH 30.3. For charges of necromancy and the
gathering of body parts from corpses, see Horace, Sat 1.8, and Lucan,
BelCiv 6.499ff. Depictions of witches are also discussed in Chapter 6.

2 See most recently Burrus 1995.
3 See Tamsyn Barton’s comments about the distinct social roles of astro-

logy in the ancient and modern worlds (1994).

4 A few exceptions are discussed in Chapter 1.
5 Points of entry into the extensive anthropological discussions of this

term range from Hammond 1970 to Tambiah 1990. For the implic-
ations for the study of religion, see J. Z. Smith 1978b: 190–207; 1995:
17–18 and Neusner et al. 1989.

6 These laws are presented most succinctly in the introductory chapter of

The Golden Bough.

7 See Tambiah 1990 for a lucid critique of Edmund Tylor and James

Frazer.

8 mTa’anit 3:8, bTa’anit 23a, bBer 34b and parallels, as well as Josephus,

Ant 14.22. See Bokser 1985.

9 For an analysis of how Honi’s power is “rabbinized,” see William Scott

Green 1975.

10 See Hildred Geertz’ illuminating critique of Keith Thomas’ attempt to

salvage the term “magic” (1975).

11 See the collection of essays and extensive bibliography in Krausz 1989.
12 See the recent book by Vyse 1997.

Greco-Roman, Christian and Jewish concepts of “magic”

1 See de Jong 1997: 387–413 for an extensive discussion of the term.
2 Kingsley 1995.

R E C T O R U N N I N G H E A D

101

3 Nock 1972: 308–33; Graf 1997:20–60.
4 The ﬁrst term comes from Vodu, the word for spirit or deity in the

language of the Fon people who live in Dahomey; the second term
refers to a Hindi or Muslim holy man.

5 Heraclitus classiﬁed them with wanderers of the night (Clement of

Alexandria, Protrep 22). Cf. Graf 1997: 21–4.

6 See Burkert 1962. Centuries later Augustine still commented on the

“more detestable name” of goetia (CivDe 10.9).

7 For other positive uses of the term “magi”, see Nock 1972: 17 n. 20.
8 Cf. De spec Leg 3.100.
9 Compare this with Clement’s positive comment that the magi were

able to foretell the savior’s birth (Strom 1.15).

10 Pharr 1932 and Kippenberg 1995.
11 For discussions of this code, see Kippenberg 1995: 149–50 and Honoré

1996.

12 See Iulius Paulus, Sententiae V.23.14–18.
13 Kippenberg 1995: 149.
14 Kippenberg 1995: 140 mentions an increase in charges during the ﬁrst

century under Tiberius and during the second half of the fourth
century under Constantius II, Valentinian I and Valens. This increase
in charges does not mean that there was more “magic.” The particular
contours of social conﬂict were distinct in the two periods, as
Kippenberg himself intimates.

15 CodTheo 9.16.1–2. Cf. Pharr 1932: 281–6.
16 Pharr 1932: 277ff. and Graf 1997: 41–2.
17 Kippenberg 1995: 144–7.
18 Pharr 1932: 277.
19 Pharr 1932: 279.
20 See also Theocritus 2.15; Cicero, ProCluentio 148; Virgil, Ecl 8.95;

Pliny, NH 25.26; Lucan, BelCiv 6.681–4.

21 Pharr 1932: 272–5.
22 The speciﬁc charges appear to have been magica maleﬁcia (Apol 1.15)

and crimen magiae (Apol 25.14). See Kippenberg 1995: 141–7.

23 This topic is discussed below.
24 On Thrace see Pliny, NH 30.7. On Thessaly, see Horace, Ode 1.27,

21–2; Epistle 2.2.208–9; Tibullus 2.4.55–60; Ovid, Amores 1.14.39–40
and 3.7.27–30; ArsAmat 2.99–104; RemAm 249–52; Seneca, Phaedra
420–23 and 790–2; Medea 787–811; HerOet 465–72 and 523–7;
Valerius Flavius 1.735–38, 6.445–8, 7.198–99 and 7.325–30; Pliny
NH 30.6–7; Statius, Theb 3.557–9; and Apuleius, Meta 2.1. See in
addition speciﬁc references to the witches of Thessaly in Chapter 6.

25 See for example the treatise on sympathy written by Proclus and

translated into English in Copenhaver 1988.

26 Copenhaver 1988.
27 Whether or not these writings constitute the origins of modern

medicine is a question beyond this study. For a lucid statement of the

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problems with simpler cultural genealogies from the ancient to
modern world, see Tamsyn Barton 1994.

28 Cf. pages 25–6 below and Simon 1986: 361–2.
29 See John Chysotom inPs. 8:3 (PG 55:110), the uncensored version of

bSanh 43a, tHullin 2:20 and parallels as well as the discussion by M.
Smith 1978: 46–50.

30 For the standard equation of paganism and magic found in the writings

of the Christian apologists, see Thee 1984: 328. Cf. Ps.-Clementine,
Hom 5.4–7; Clement, Protrep 1 and Paed 3.4.

31 For Christian rituals that looked magical to pagans, see for example

Suetonius Nero 16.2 and the comments of Celsus preserved by Origen
in Contra Celsum.

32 This common claim is also discussed in Chapter 2.
33 The treatise was written in the 240s, probably in 248. Translations

from Contra Celsum are taken from Chadwick’s edition.

34 See Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of the various supernatural

ﬁgures.

35 For a modern repetition of this claim, see Thee who states that there is

“no real boundary between magic and pagan worship.” He accepts the
Christian polemics that they do not engage in magic, stating “In
essence, magic did not ‘ﬁt’ in the Christian world-view while it was a
natural counterpart of the pagan religion” (1984: 345).

36 Traditions about healing songs are found in Homer, the Derveni

papyrus’ reference to the songs of the magi, the scrolls found at
Qumran (Apocryphl Psalms (11QPsa) 27:9) and the rabbinic stories
about “Songs of the Stricken” (bSheb 15b; jErub 10.11 and jShab 6.2).

37 Here again Origen follows other early Christian writers such as Irenaeus.
38 For recent theoretical discussions of rabbis and magic which struggle

with the dilemma, see Alexander 1986; Schäfer 1990; Swartz 1990;
1996; and Kern-Ulmer 1996.

39 The recent article by Kuemmerlin-McLean 1992 is more nuanced than

most. See also Baruch Levine’s comment about the nature of Biblical
injunctions against magic (1974: 89).

40 For Biblical citations see Deut 18:10–11; Lev 19:26, 31; 20:1–6; 27;

Exod 22:18; Isa 47:9–15; 2 Kings 21:6, 9:22; 2 Chron 33:6; Mic 5:11;
Jer 29:9; Mal 5:3; Nah 3:4; Ezek 13:17–23; Jer 8:17; Ps 58:6; Qoh
10:11. For “bad” kings who practiced magic see 2 Kings 21:6.

41 Translations from Schmidt 1994:179.
42 Similarly self-mutilation was permitted until the sixth century

BCE

(Schmidt 1994: 287).

43 Jer 27:9–10, 29:8–9; Zech 10:2; and Ezek 12:24.
44 Compare raising the dead with a skull discussed in the text and raising

the dead without a skull discussed in bBabaK 117a. See also jSan 7.10.

45 For capital punishment for female witches compare Ex 22:17 and

rabbinic texts discussed in Chapter 6.

46 It is impossible to give a simple date for this discussion. We can,

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however, point out that many of the same themes are found in parallel
Christian and Greco-Roman texts which are datable to the ﬁrst three
centuries, as noted throughout this discussion.

47 Contrast Urbach’s reading of the ruling as a comment that only

magicians who take their work seriously are liable (1975: 100) with
Levinas’ recent interpretation that magic is important only when it has
economic consequences (1994: 142).

48 The role of intention is central in many other rabbinic discussions.
49 See Pharr’s comment that ancient authorities claimed that only the

practice not the knowledge was prohibited (1932: 293).

50 For a discussion of these laws, see Barb 1963: 106, Kippenberg 1995:

149–50.

51 Healings are attributed both to rabbis and to women associated with

rabbinical families. See Chapter 6.

52 Attributed to Rabbi Johanan.
53 For further discussion of this topic, see Chapter 6.
54 See the contest between Jannai and a woman in bSanh 67b.
55 bShab 67a, tShab 6–7 in the name of Abbaye and Rava. Lieberman

1936: I.126–7; 1955: 74ff.

56 Goldin 1963: 118 and Lieberman 1955: 83.
57 Goldin 1963: 118 and Lieberman 1955: 88.
58 Goldin 1963: 118 and Lieberman 1955: 82.
59 bShab 67a. Cf. bNid 66a.
60 See the discussion by Lieberman 1965: 103.
61 Zosimos, the compiler of late antique alchemical texts discussed below

in Chapter 4, had an especially high opinion of Jewish alchemical
writings and preserved anything he found attributed to Jews.

62 These ancient equations led a generous number of scholars (such as

Simon 1986) to argue that late antique magic was in fact a product of
Judaism.

63 See also Juvenal 6.542–7.
64 Rawson notes, for example, that there is no evidence that during the

Republic people turned to Jews for magical aid (1985: 309).

Daimons and angels and the world of exorcism

1 bKid 29b. In this story a seven-headed daimon appeared to the over-

night guest.

2 bHul 105b. Cf. bShab 81b–82a.
3 bHul 105b.
4 For introductory discussions of angels and daimons see Kohler 1901;

Cumont 1907; Michl 1962; Colpe 1978; Newson 1992; and Riley 1992.

5 See, for example, the extended presentation of fallen angels in 1 Enoch

6–8 and also Pirqe R. El 22.

6 See GenRab 24; LevRab 28.3, 5.
7 bBer 3a, bHul 105b; and Tanhuma Mishpatim 19.

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8 According to Celsus the Jews worship the heavens and angels (CC 5.6).
9 Gen 32:1; Job 25:3; Josh 5:13–15; 1 Kings 22:19.

10 Gen 3:24; 1 Sam 4:4; Ps 80:2; 98(99):1.
11 Gen 16:11; 21:17; 31:11–13; Ex 3:2–6; Num 22:22, 31 and Jud 2:1.
12 See M. Barker’s discussion, though her differentiation between Elohim

and Yahweh remains controversial (1992).

13 Gen 18:2, 19:5; Jud 6:17, 13:6. Some creatures were hybrid human

and animal forms, such as the Seraphim, Cherubim and Se’irim.

14 Texts which describe the multi-layered heavens range from the Enoch

texts, which pre-date our period of interest, to the much later esoteric
rabbinic discussion found in tractate Hagigah.

15 Bickerman and Smith 1976: 14.
16 Cumont 1907: 166 and Nilsson 1946.
17 Cf. Oenomaus in Eusebius, PE 5:21 (213B).
18 1 Enoch 19:1 and Philo, de Decal 74.
19 Peter Brown 1978: 151.
20 See also Euripides’ comment that good mortals became daimons (Alc

1003).

21 LXX Ps 96 95:4ff. and LXX Deut 32:17.
22 See especially deIsis 25–6 and deDefectu 10–21.
23 Noted by J. Z. Smith 1978a. For a modern re-use of the Persian theory

see Kohut 1866.

24 Il 3.420 for Aphrodite, a usage that is still found in Acts 17:18.
25 Among the most important texts is Symposium 202d–203a.
26 Epinomis 984ef on the hierarchy of beings.
27 For additional discussions of the daimons, see Maximus of Tyre 8–9

(86–110); Porphyry, deAbstin 27–42; Ps-Clementine, Homilies 8–9;
Recognitions 4 and Apuleius, deDogmaPlat 1.12.

28 See Apuleius’ extensive discussion in deDeoSoc 6–9.
29 For important points about daimons see InPlatRemp II, p. 271, 21

Kroll; InCratyl 128, p. 75, 9ff. Pasquali; InPlatRemp II, p. 345, 1 Kroll;
InTim III p. 140, 26ff. Diehl; and InPlatRemp II p. 255, 23ff. Kroll.

30 InCratyl 74, p. 98, 21, Pasquali.
31 This text is discussed at greater length in Chapter 3.
32 See, for example, bGitten 68b where a daimon inhabits a male body in

order to have intercourse with women. For men, intercourse with
female daimons, see Tanhuma Buber Appendix p. 6.

33 Kapferer 1979: 156. See also Corin 1998.
34 Comparisons will only be improved when, as Ruth Padel argues, we are

not comparing isolated metaphors but more developed models (1983).

35 Brown 1978: 25.
36 Brown 1998: 30–1.
37 Vermes 1995: 69–89 has a complete translation of the text which is

thought to be among the earliest documents in the library, dating
perhaps to 100

BCE

. We do not know if anyone ever attempted to live

by these rules when the texts were composed. We do have rich evi-

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105

dence of later church orders which reﬂect similar themes and were used
in monastic communities.

38 The date of the Book of Acts is disputed and thus the dating for this

use of the term. For discussion, see Munck 1967.

39 These formulas are discussed at greater length in Chapter 3.
40 Mark 3:11, 5:7–8; Luke 4:34, 8:28.
41 The exorcism discussed below also includes blowing air on the pos-

sessed person from his foot to his head.

42 See Bonner 1927; Knox 1930; and Thraede 1969.
43 See the now-classic work by Austin 1962 which has inﬂuenced many

studies, among which is Tambiah 1968.

44 For a more detailed discussion, see Janowitz 2001 and the biblio-

graphy cited there.

45 See bSuc 28a and Clement, Strom. 1.21.
46 See Pliny, NH 28.6; Clement, Strom 1.15 and 5.8; and PGM 7.532. For

additional citations and discussion, see McCown 1923 and Bonner
1946: 29–30.

47 Compare bKid 81b and bMeil 17b.
48 For the use of Jesus’ name in exorcisms, see Mark 9:38, Luke 9:49,

Origen, CC 1.6, 1.25, 6.40; Irenaeus, AdHaer 2.5; and in rabbinic
literature tHullin 2:22–23; jShab 14.4; jAZ 2.2, bAZ 27b; and
LamRab Buber 5:16. See Geller 1977: 146ff.

49 Compare Luke 4:34–6 where Jesus rebuked him “Be silent and come

out of him.” In Jude 9 Michael promises the devil that the “Lord will
rebuke you.”

50 The Greek texts were edited by Preisendanz in 1931 and a second

edition prepared by Henrichs 1973. English translation is found in
Betz 1986: 44–6.

51 Knox 1930 divides the exorcism into two sections, the ﬁrst 3033–45

where the goal is for the daimon to speak, and the second 3045–78
where the daimon does not speak, with a concluding section 3078–end.

52 See below, pages 56–7.
53 For similar summaries, see Jud 5:5–19; Philo, VitCon 11; Josephus,

Ant 2.12–16 and 3.17. For a discussion of this type of historical
summary, see Frankfurter 1995.

54 For discussion, see Duling 1985.
55 Among them the Galilean amulet from the third century

men-

tioned by Duling 1975: 244 n. 39.

56 See Perdrizet 1903 and Goodenough 1963: 1.68, 2.226–38, 7.198–200

and 9.1044–67.

57 Duling 1975: 245ff.
58 See McCown 1922: 5.
59 Additional stories about Asmodeus appear in TestSolo 5:1–13; bGit

78a; bPes 110a; and in bBer 6a where he rules in place of King
Solomon for a while.

60 bGit 68a. Cf. PesRab 15.

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106

61 Another pilgrim, also from the fourth century, saw the cave where

Solomon tortured the daimons (McCown 1922: 23).

62 See Knox 1930: 202–3.
63 For dating and bibliography see Carey Moore 1996. As described here

the text seems most likely to pre-date the ﬁrst century

64 Modiﬁed sacriﬁces are discussed below in Chapter 3, page 53.
65 Tertullian, AdScap 4; Hippolytus, AposCon 20ff.
66 This point is discussed by J. Z. Smith 1978a.
67 For exceptions, see Marcus Aurelius, Med 1.6; and Plotinus, Enn

2.9.14, as well as Lucan.

Ancient rites for gaining lovers

1 Cited according to ﬁrmament and line number following Morgan 1983.

Hence this rite appears in line 31 of the Second Firmament.

2 Scholars who label the text “magic” include Margalioth 1966; Dan

1967: 208–114; Maier 1968; Niggemeyer 1975; Gruenwald 1980:
225–34; Schäfer 1990; Morgan 1983; and Swartz 1990.

3 See Introduction note 8 and mSotah 9:5, Avot 5.6, GenRab 5.5; and

Bokser 1985: 42.

4 In a variant reading the text is given to Adam.
5 See, for example, the reference to a Noahic book of healing in Jubilees

10:13.

6 Rituals which conﬁrm an elevated status for the practitioner are dis-

cussed in Chapter 5.

7 In The Book of Secrets healing rituals are found at 1.29, 2.95 and 2.182.

Both 1.94 and 5.15 are directed at learning about the future.

8 Alexander supplements Margalioth’s discussion, adding that the

indiction method of counting years began in 312, with a ﬁve year
indiction in Egypt perhaps as early as 287; the use of this method in
“non-ﬁscal contexts” did not begin until the second half of the fourth
century (1986: 348 n.15). The text lacks the paleographical evidence
crucial in dating Greek papyri (Morgan 1983: 8).

9 This is the same formula as found in the exorcism discussed in Chapter 2.

10 ShirRab 7.8. Cf. Lieberman 1965: 107–8.
11 See, for example, PGM 2.110.
12 See Lieberman 1955 3: 103–4; 1965: 97, 100–14.
13 No clay bowls dating to the ﬁrst three centuries have been found; most

are from the ﬁfth to the seventh centuries.

14 In some versions it is R. Johanan. Cf. Lieberman 1974: 24.
15 See Chapter 2, page 31.
16 Cf. ExMar 45. The speciﬁc reference to offerings here is from Homer,

Il iv. 49; ix. 50; xxiv. 70.

17 See also 1 Enoch 19.
18 Lauterbach is probably correct that this practice was the basis for the

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107

popular Tashlich service where individuals cast bread into a body of
water for forgiveness of sins (1936). See for example the reference to
worshipping the Ruler of the Sea in bHullin 41b and to the Ruler of
the Sea following Rabbi Joshua’s orders in jSanh7.13. The practice of
throwing something into a lake is also denounced as a Way of the
Amorites (tShab 6.1).

19 The statue of a lion is used in 2.18.
20 The injunction against images Exod 20:4-5a is supplemented by Ex

20:23, 34:17; Lev 19:4, 26:1; Deut 4:15–19, 25:5–8. For Christian
adoption of this language, see Acts 17:16 and 19:24–41.

21 For the use of images in Israelite religion, see Ex 32–34; Jud 8:26–27,

17–18; 1 Kings 12:28–33; 2 Kings 18:4; 21:1–7; Hos 3:4; and I Sam
19:13. The iconography of the deity’s consort, the Asherah, is so
repressed that it is remembered only as a wooden pole.

22 See Herodotus, Hist 4.62, Ammianus Marcellinus 31.2.23 and Xeno-

phanes cited above.

23 See Majercik 1989: 26–7; Lewy 1978: 230–8; Dodds 1947: 63.
24 The evidence is gathered in numerous places including Goodenough

1963 and Hachlili 1988.

25 See Lieberman 1962: 121 n. 33.
26 See Xenophanes, DK 21B 15016, Heredotus, Hist 4.62 and Ammianus

Marcellinus 31.2.23.

27 In this vein a recent article on idolatry characterizes the numerous

small statues located in what appears to be the context of worship of
Yahweh as popular practice or superstition and not formal religion
(Curtis 1992).

28 For a more technical discussion of Peircean semiotics, see Janowitz 2001.
29 See Bonner 1950.
30 The modern practice is one box on the left hand and one on the head.
31 Probably composed in the ﬁrst and second century

BCE

in Alexandria.

32 Josephus comments on the practice (Ant 4.213).
33 See the discussion of the secrecy which surrounds Greek binding spells

by Faraone 1991, especially p. 11.

34 Even a scholar as subtle as Alan Segal comments about the use of curses

tablets that “No one would have practiced it with the impression he
was practicing a legal and wholesome religious rite, however, richly
deserved was the damage to the intended victim” (1980: 88–97).

35 For a combination of blessings and curses, see Deut 27–8. On the

automatic nature of both blessings and curse, see Gen 27 and Num 22.

Using natural forces for divine goals:

Maria the Jewess and early alchemy

1 Forbes 1964: 138 and Lindsay 1970: chaps 5–6 tentatively date him to

200

BCE

. See also M. Wellman 1928, Festugière 1950: 197 and

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108

Waszink 1954. He is sometimes conﬂated with Democritus, under
whose name he may have written (Columella, RR 7.5.17).

2 A statement of his about menstrual blood is discussed in Chapter 6

page 93.

3 Pliny, NH 32.52. Wellman 1928 remains the most important discussion.
4 See Suda, DL 1.10; Eusebius, PrEv 3.2; and Geoponica 20.6.3.
5 Rawson 1985.
6 Slightly later writers include Pamphilos of Alexandria (ﬁrst century

)

who wrote a treatise called “Natural Forces” (Geoponica 15.1.6;
Wellman 1928; Festugière 1950: 197), Xenocrates of Aphrodisia
(Wellman 1928; Festugière 1950: 197), a physician in Nero’s time,
who wrote about natural treatments and Aelius Promotus (second
century

) who also wrote “On Natural Forces” (Wellman 1893).

7 The confusion between Democritus and Bolos means that Bolos is in

turn implicated in early alchemy (Taylor 1930: 114–15).

8 For discussion of the term “alchemy,” see Forbes 1964: 126 and for

numerous possible derivations, many of them fanciful, see Lindsay
1970: 68–89.

9 For introductions to alchemy, see Berthelot 1885; Riess 1893; Festugière

1939, 1950; Taylor 1949; and Forbes 1964.

10 Zosimos wrote before the Serapeum was destroyed in the 390s but cited

Africanus who died in 232. On his dates see among others Berthelot
1885: 201 and Festugière 1950: 239. For a concise introduction see
Jackson 1978: 7. See Taylor 1937: 88 on his general importance. In
general on Zosimos, see Plessner 1976, Riess 1893: 1348; and Hopkins
1934: 69–77. Patai 1994: 51ff. and Lindsay 1970: 323ff. must be used
with care. Zosimos’ writings are cited by the name of the treatise and
numbering in Berthelot’s corpus, which is the same for the Greek and
the French translation. We cite this edition as Ber. This is a different
system of citation than that followed by Patai, who cites the pagination
from the French translation, easily confused with the pagination of the
Greek original, which he also occasionally cites in error. Later writers
cite Maria as well, but these citations raise additional problems about
authenticity and thus will not be included.

11 For a brief discussion of the unusual presence of women in early

alchemical traditions, see Chapter 6.

12 Lefkowitz and Fant (1992: 299–300) are skeptical that Maria ever

existed because the name is common and could be pseudepigraphic.
Issues of gender are discussed in Chapter 6.

13 We will return to this point in Chapter 6.
14 See the discussion in Jackson 1978: 3.
15 “On the Letter Omega” is available in English translation in Jackson

1978.

16 Cited by Lippmann 1919: 1.46.
17 On Maria, see Patai 1994:60–91 who cites most of the earlier material.
18 Patai 1994: 60 notes that Zosimos considers “ancient” a treatise on

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furnaces, which appears to have been written by Maria. On Maria as
Moses’ sister, see Patai 1994: 74, which notes that Lippmann offers no
support for his claims that this equation was already made by Zosimos.

19 Taylor would date the text to 100

(1930: 115; 1937: 32). A

“Democritus” is mentioned in the Leiden papyrus, dated approxi-
mately 250

, making this a possible terminus ad quem for the text. Cf.

Halleux 1981: 73.

20 See Berthelot 1885: 170–4 and Patai 1994 chapter 4.
21 “On the Letter Omega” 9, Jackson 1978: 29. The same treatise

explains that this interpretation was deposited in the Sarapion by
Asenas, the high priest of Jerusalem, who sent Hermes to translate the
Hebrew Scriptures into Greek and Egyptian. “On the Letter Omega”
8, Jackson 1978: 27.

22 “The First Book of the Final Reckoning,” Ber 3.51.3.
23 Similar stories are found in numerous texts. The angels taught women

charms, enchantments, the cutting of roots, and taught them about
plants (1 Enoch 7) and the fallen angels taught “people making
swords, knives, shields, breastplates, and to their chosen ones,
bracelets, decorations (eye-shadow) with antimony, ornamentation,
beautifying of eyelids, all kinds of precious stones, all coloring
tinctures and the ‘transmutation of the world’ (1 Enoch 8). A recent
translation uses the term “alchemy” here, but this is probably an
anachronism or a later addition since the term was not in use during
the period when most scholars think Enoch was composed. Jubilees
discussed the fallen angels but not their speciﬁc teachings. See
Tertullian, CultFem I.2 and II.10 which follows Enoch in much more
detail than, for example, Clement, Strom 5.1 and Justin 2Apol 5.

24 Learning the Jewish secrets about metals is hard, according to

Zosimos, since they are closely guarded and “nobody either among the
Jews or among the Greeks has ever revealed them . . . They are very
jealous of divulging the art itself; and they did not let a manipulator
remain without punishment.” “The First Book of the Final Reckoning,”
Ber 3.51.3.

25 “Round Alum Must Be Employed,” Ber 3.20.6.
26 Olympiodorus “On the Sacred Arts,” Ber 2.4.54.
27 The alloy might be silver on the inside too, since it is an alloy of

copper, and thus look superior to regular silver (Hopkins 1934: 96).

28 The Greek term can be translated either way.
29 Ps-Democritus “Synesius the Philosopher to Dioscorus,” Ber 2.3.6.
30 See Hopkins 1934: 97–8. Taylor 1949: 49–50 believes that this stage

could be either further tinting or simply cleaning of the metal or
taking away the rust (ios).

31 Patai states that Maria said the Great Work could only be done in the

Egyptian month of Pharmuti (March–April), that it should be wrapped
in linen and boiled in Pontus Water (1994: 64). Here Patai is follow-
ing Lippmann (1919: 48), who in turn is drawing on Olympiodorus in

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110

Ber. It is not clear from Olympiodorus that these ideas all belong to
Maria. I have therefore left them out of consideration here.

32 Cf. Hopkins 1934: 94–95.
33 Forbes mentions descriptions of such devices in Pliny and Dioscorides

(1948: 24). It is also referred to by Theophrastus (De Odor 22). See
Keyser 1990: 362.

34 Forbes adds that there is no evidence of any such apparatus in the Leiden

or Stockholm papyri (1948: 21). Nor is it found in Ps-Democritus.

35 Forbes considers and dismisses the possibility that the term refers to

the separation of types of distillate into multiple fractions (1948: 23).

36 Taylor (1949: 46–9) states that the closest modern analogy is a reﬂux

extractor.

37 Cf. Taylor 1949: 46–9.
38 Similarly, elsewhere Zosimos writes, “Maria said ﬁrst, ‘The copper

cooked with the sulphur, treated by nitre-oil and shaken off frequently
undergoing the same treatment, results in a good gold without a
shadow’” (Zosimos, “On the Measurement of Yellowing,” Ber 3.24.3).

39 “On the Body of Magnesium”, Ber 3.28.8.
40 One result of this is that Ruelle substitutes his notion of the “real”

name of the substance in the French translation for the name in the
Greek, such as “sulphur” for “lead.”

41 Zosimos “About the Philosopher’s Stone,” Ber 3.29.1.
42 Berthelot and Ruelle 1963: 2.1. This treatise is mentioned brieﬂy in

Chapter 3.

43 These are all themes familiar from the new cosmology discussed in

Chapter 1.

44 Keyser 1990: 360. See also Wellman’s claim that magic began with

Bolos of Mendes (1928), repeated with some skepticism in Gordon
1987.

45 Hippolytus in his attack on Christian opponents gives away the secret

of “aqua ardens” in the hope that this will discredit “magicians” and
hence his rivals (Ref 4.31). This recipe is traced by modern scholars to
Anaxilaus and then presented as both proof that magic was in fact
thriving in Egypt and that the process of distillation had been
invented by those same circles. See Diels 1969: 427–41 following
Wellman 1928: 56–62.

46 See also Keyser 1990: 367, 369.
47 Note also the statement that the death of Jesus reduced the daimons

to impotence (CC 7:17, 8:43; ComJn 1.37; cf. ComJn 6.36–7).

48 Origen talks about the “natural attraction” of faith and divine power

(ComMatt 10.19; PG 13.884).

49 Tertullian appears to use natural processes to explain how the holy

spirit becomes infused in the holy water (DeBapt 4).

50 Nock connects the term with the Latin word “drastike” often translated

as “efﬁcacious” (Nock and Festugière 1950: 232).

51 Betz 1986: 176 n. 39.

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111

Divine power, human hands:

becoming gods in the ﬁrst centuries

1 See the classic discussions by Rohde 1901 II:281 and Wilamowitz-

Moellendorff 1959 I.371f.

2 Discussed brieﬂy in Winston 1979: 128. Cf. 4 Ezra 7:97; 2 Baruch

51:10; 4 Macc 17:5; 2 Enoch 66:7; Matt 13:43; Sifra Deut 10; and CII
I, p. 241, no.306.

3 All of these are discussed in detail below except for the role of

vegetarianism (Porphyry, DeAbst

1.54) and the taurobolium

(Prudentius Peristeph, 10/1078).

4 The shift from earthly to heavenly cult is discussed brieﬂy in Chapter

2, page 31.

5 See Hodayot Hymns (1QH) 6:13, 11:10ff. and Community Rule (1QS)

11.5–10.

6 See especially the second Song in 4Q ShhirSabb.
7 See, for example, the fragmentary hymn from 4QH

fr.7, sometimes

referred to as the “Self-gloriﬁcation Hymn” which appears to describe
explicitly the transformation of a human into a divine being. No doubt
as the Qumran texts are scrutinized more closely other examples of
merging with angels and transforming of humans will be found.

8 The superiority of some humans over the angels is depicted in rabbinic

literature in numerous ways. Angels are described as ranking below
humans (bHag 12b, bSanh 93a) while elsewhere angels are described as
roasting meat for Adam (bSanh 59b). Humans, through study of the
Torah and practice of the commandments, can overcome death, gain
eternal life and become divine beings (see, for example, DeutRab 7.12).
Moses in particular is presented as having been transformed into a
divine being (DeutRab 11.10). Especially interesting are the citations
which related recitation of angelic liturgy with changed status of
humans such as in DeutRab 2.36. These are impossible to date, but do
remind us that transformation via the recitation of angelic liturgy
should not be looked at as a “sectarian” theme.

9 This text is found in multiple copies. See the critical edition by

Newsom 1985. She argues that, despite the ambiguity of the case, the
scales tip in favor of the document not being a product of the sectarian
community due to the presence of a copy at Masada and the particular
manner in which God’s name is recorded (Newsom 1990).

10 For a lengthier description of this text see Janowitz 2001.
11 The text is preserved only in Armenian so we cannot be sure of the

Greek. Marcus speculates in his translation that Philo may have used

¢paqanat…xw

(1953: 82).

12 A young girl is declared to be the goddess Hecate, a priestess is said to

have oracular powers from the grave, a drowned girl is called a nymph
and receives sacriﬁces, the dead are “equals of the gods” and they are

N O T E S

112

said to grant release from illness (Lattimore 1962: 102–6). In a Latin
epigram Pomptilla in death is merged with the Queen of the Under-
world and becomes the goddess Iuno Inferna (G. Coppola 1931).

13 Winston 1979: 276–7.
14 Deiﬁcation of kings during their lifetime as in the case of the Ptolemies

raises issues about Egyptian religious practices, a topic beyond the
scope of this chapter.

15 See Nock’s shift from ﬁrst minimalizing the extent to which requests

were made of deiﬁed emperors to later ﬁnding more evidence for it
(1972).

16 Price 1987: 71 points to Atticum 12.45.2, 13.28.3, 14.14.1 and

14.19.3.

17 Philippici 1.13 and 2.110.
18 ImpPomp 41.
19 Atticum 1.16.13; Lactantius, DivInst 1.15,16–20.
20 Funeral of Augustus 56. 34–46, of Pertinax 75. 4–5.
21 Funeral of Septimus Severus 4.2.
22 Fragment 645 Rose.
23 The term was also used in the sense of becoming immortal by being

written into history (Polyibus, His 6.54.2 and Diodorus Siculus, Hist
1.1).

24 For another example of the verb used in relationship to immortaliz-

ation in foreign religions, see Diodorus Siculus’ analysis of Persian
religion, where they are said to worship the dove as a means of
immortalizing Semiramis (Hist 2.20).

25 Plato, Charm 156D and Aristotle, NicEth 1177b33. A less ﬂattering

Greek version of this story circulated: Zalmoxis was Pythagoras’ slave
and lived secretly in an underground chamber only to emerge and
teach about the afterlife. See Hartog 1988: 84–109.

26 On the deiﬁcation of the Getea, see also Diodorus Siculus, Hist 1.94;

Arian, Anab i.3.2; Lucian, Scyth 1.860, DeorConc 9.533.

27 A poem written by a contemporary of Augustus refers to the distinct

nature of royal souls (Manilius 1.14).

28 Vespasian deiﬁed his daughter after her death (Suetonius, Vesp 3, CIL

5.2829).

29 On Antinous speciﬁcally, see Pausanias 8.9.8 and Dio Cassius 69.11.3.

For Antinous inscriptions, see IG 4.590 and 14.960–1 and statues,
Kraus 1959.

30 On divinization by drowning in the Nile, see Herodotus, Hist 2.90.

Drowning of certain animals was also understood to separate the divine
part from the mortal body. See PGM 1.5 and 3.1.

31 The cult was never celebrated in Rome.
32 In the case of Hadrian, the Senate delayed deiﬁcation for a month. But

as power became more and more centralized in the emperor, the role of
the Senate was diminished.

N O T E S

113

33 See M. Smith 1983.
34 The Chaldaean Oracles as reconstructed by Lewy also include a pseudo-

burial.

35 See Harnack 1918: 131–5.
36 The term appears twice in this chapter.
37 Riesenfeld 1946.
38 First argued by Lewy 1978 chapter 3 and succinctly described by

Stroumsa 1981. For a slightly different view, see Johnston 1992 and
1997.

39 Fr.122,123,138. Cf. Iamblichus’s reference to ascent and its

relationship to the Chaldaean sacraments (DeMyst 3.31).

40 Papyrus 574 of the Bibliotheque Nationale, PGM 1V:475–829.
41 Almost identical techniques are used to achieve an ascent in the Nag

Hammadi tractate Marsanes, where we ﬁnd the reciting of hymns,
angel names, and strings of vowels combined with periods of silence.
See Pearson 1984.

42 Evidence of editing includes the female reference at the start of the text

followed by the entirely masculine references within the text. Like the
ascent in Hekhalot Rabbati, discussed below, this ascent also has
additions that appear before the ascent and appended instructions for
supplemental rituals. An introductory reference to herbs and spices is
usually considered an addition. The end of the text includes instruc-
tions for a scarab ceremony and for making amulets, with two
additional compositions appended.

43 The Hebrew term used is “descent.” For Scholem’s speculations on this

term, which have not been superseded, see 1954: 46ff. and 1965: 20
n.1.

44 The Hebrew text is available in Schäfer 1981: 81–280 and German

translation Schäfer 1987–1991 Vol. II. On its redaction, see Schäfer
1988: 63–74 and Gruenwald 1980: 150–173. Hekhalot Rabbati is a
composite text which is difﬁcult to date. M. Smith dated one of the
apocalyptic sections to mid-fourth century, but also argued, following
Scholem, that the other sections contained earlier material going back
to the ﬁrst century (1963).

45 For a recent study of this material and its relationship to earlier strains

of thought within Judaism, see Elior 1999.

46 The ascent is part of a composite text which combines several series of

hymns with Shi’ur Komah material and the main ascent, which is a
combination of two ascents (sections 13–22 and 23–25). The text
concludes with additional hymns and two appended stories about
forgetting learning.

47 Noted by M. Smith 1963.
48 Two other texts associated with the corpus, 2 Enoch 22: 8–10 and 3

Enoch 4–19, include descriptions of transformation accompanied by
fasting, changes of clothing, and blessings. These may have been
components of ascent/deiﬁcation rituals at some point.

N O T E S

114

49 See the discussion of divine names in Chapter 3.
50 Scholem argued that ascent was a foretaste of the heavenly world

(1965: 17–18).

51 A modern remnant of this is the practice of standing on one’s toes

when reciting the formula from Isaiah.

52 Since the Greek word for “holy” was not frequently used in Greco-

Roman prayers, its use is seen as evidence of a Jewish origin for the
prayer.

53 Pearson 1984: 337 notes that Michael Psellus made reference to Jewish

elements already in the tenth century.

54 They mimic the praises spoken by the heavenly powers which appear

earlier in the text.

55 Tanhura Qedoshim 37.5. See also PGM 1.196ff. and 3 Enoch 35.6.
56 See J. Z. Smith 1978b: 62 n. 99.
57 Nock noted the similarities between Corpus Hermeticum 11.20–21 and

Philo, LegAll 3.44 (1950: 77 n. 7).

58 The various tractates do not agree on all the details of deiﬁcation. The

tenth tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum argued that deiﬁcation means
the separation of the body from the soul; hence there is no deiﬁcation
while still in the body (CH 10.7). While the human mind is capable of
uniting humans with the gods (10.23), death still remains a major
barrier. Humans are described as gods who die and gods, as immortal
humans (10.25).

59 GenRab 90.2 and Sifre Deut 49 rationalize the material (M. Smith

1958: 479).

60 InSTheoph 8, Philos 10.33, 10.34 and the discussion in Harnack 1918:

131–5.

61 Pesiq RabKah 25. Compare LamRab 1.33. See the discussion in Idel

1988: 158ff.

“Even the decent women practice witchcraft”:

magic and gender in late antiquity

1 See the work of Valerie Knivelson on men accused of witchcraft in

eighteenth century Russia (Knivelson, unpublished).

2 Collections of anecdotes about women and magic in rabbinic texts can

be found in Meir Bar-Ilan 1993 and Fishbane 1993.

3 On the power of this trope to reshape events see Ilan 1996: 223–4.
4 Noted above in Chapter 1.
5 On shifting attitudes towards the dead see Schmidt 1994.
6 Discussed in Chapter 1.
7 See the discussion in Gordon 1987: 80–2.
8 See Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Women of Colchis.
9 On the witches from Thessaly, see Propertius 1.5.4–6 and 3.24.9–10;

Lucan, BelCiv, 6.413–830; Statius, Theb 3.140–46 and 4.504–11;

N O T E S

115

Martial 9.29.9; and Juvenal 6.610–12. For Thessalonian women who
attempt to bring down the moon, see Aristophanes, Clouds 749; Plato,
Gorgias 513a; Horace, Epodes 5.46; Propertius 1.1.19; Lucan, BelCiv
5.438–506; and Plutarch, OrDelphi 12, deDeOc 13.

10 In particular, the rabbis adopted a number of Greco-Roman methods

for argumentation such as “from the minor to the major” and develop
them into a ﬁne art. See Janowitz and Lazarus 1992.

11 This is not, of course, to say that these ﬂuids are naturally unclean,

only to point out the type of rhetoric used.

12 Cohen 1991 stresses this point.
13 See, for example, Milgrom’s classic argument that items are declared

unclean due to associations with death and not with daimonic forces as
has previously been argued (1991).

14 See Parmentier 1994: 153–67.
15 This is brieﬂy discussed in Chapter 1.
16 Tacitus, Hist 5.6 and Josephus, BJ 4.480. See also Strabo, Geo 16.2.43

who cites Posidonius as an ancient source for this notion and who
associates it particularly with Jews.

17 See also the reference to Hypatia using a menstrual rag to avert hail

(Damascius, VitIsid 77.13f.).

18 Lieberman 1965: 102 n. 51 mentions mNid 7:3.
19 The story is found in mSanh 6:4; the identiﬁcation of the women as

witches in bSanh 45b; jHag 2.2; jSanh 5.9.

20 For example, a woman can turn into a donkey (bSanh 67b).
21 See Ilan 1996: 189 on evidence about midwives in rabbinic literature.
22 See the discussion by Tal Ilan 1997: 86–8. A similar reference to

delaying childbirth is found in Theaetetus 149C–D.

23 bYoma 84a; jAZ 2.2; and jShab 14.4. In the ﬁrst version she is

anonymous, in the second her name is recorded as “Thimtinis” and in
the third “Bat Domitian.”

24 Women in patriarchal societies do not have the freedom or resources to

start women’s religions; social factors such as matrifocality, some
emphasis on female lines of descent, or gender dissonance explain the
exceptions (Sered 1994, especially p. 64).

25 So, too, Beruriah, the rare ﬁgure of an educated female in rabbinic

literature, rules on practical issues related to women. Her most
interesting traditions are also late (Goodblatt 1975).

Concluding note: the legacy of the ﬁrst centuries

1 Ha-Aretz newspaper, English edition, 24 June, 1999, p. 2.

N O T E S

116

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129

INDEXES

PRIMARY SOURCE INDEX

Old Testament

Gen

1:27

2:1–3

3:24

105

6:1–4

29, 33

6:4

9:6

16:11

105

21:17

105

109

31:11–13

105

32:1

105

33:20

3:2–6

105

7:11

13:10–16

20:4–5a

108

20:23

108

22:17

23, 104

22:18

86–7, 103

25–31

32–34

108

35–40

Num

109

22:22, 31

105

Lev

17:7

19:4

108

19:26, 31

103

20:1–6

103

20:26–27

103

26:1

108

Deut

4:15–19

108

5:8

108

5:27–8

109

6:4–9

11:13–21

18:10–11

21, 103

32:17

Joshua

5:13–15

105

Judges

2:1

105

8:17–18, 26–27

108

1 Sam

4:4

105

19:13

108

1 Kings

4:29–34

12:28–33

108

22:19

105

2 Kings

9:22

18:4

108

21:1–7

108

21:6

103

2 Chron

11:15

33:6

103

Isaiah

3:3

103

6:1–2

6:3

13:21

34:14

47:9

47:9–15

103

47:12

Jeremiah

7:18

8:11, 17

103

27:9–10

104

29:8

103

29:8–9

104

Micah

3:6–7

5:11

103

Psalms

29:1

58:6

21, 103

60:14

80:2

105

99:1

105

106:37

Job

1:6

2:1

38:7

Ezek

1:5

12:24

104

13:17–23

88, 103

Zech

10:2

104

Nahum

3:4

87, 103

Hos

3:4

108

Malachi

3:5

103

I N D E X E S

130

Daniel

1:20

2:2

12:3

Qoh

7:28

10:11

103

LXX

Deut

32:17

31, 105

Psalms

95:5

105

New Testament

Matthew

8:16

8:28

13:43

112

17:15

Mark

1:26

3:11

106

5:4–5

5:7–8

106

9:18

9:20

9:38

106

Luke

4:34–36

106

4:35

8:28

106

8:29

9:39

9:49

106

John

8:48

10:20

12:31

Acts

8:9

17:16

108

17:18

105

19:11–16

19:24–41

108

Col

2:18

Ephesians

2:2

2 Peter

1:4

Jude

106

Dead Sea Scrolls

War Scroll (1QM)

1:10

14:15

17:7

I N D E X E S

131

Hymns (1QH)

6:13

112

10:8

Community Rule (1QS)

7.10–11,15–16

11.5–10

109

Blessings (1QBs)

3.25–26

4.25–26

War Scroll variant (4QM

)

Apocryphal Psalms (11QPsa)

27:9

103

Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

Wisdom of Solomon

3:7

5:5

7:15–22

14:15

TestSolo

5:1–13

107

Apocalypse of Abraham

17:2–19

19:4–6

ApocAdam

7.13

1 Enoch

1:5

6:2

6–8

105

109

7–8

110

11:20

13:8

14:3

108

104:2

2 Enoch

22:8–10

114

66:7

112

3 Enoch

4–19

114

35–40

115

Jub

4:15

10:13

107

15:31

29:11

Test of the XII Pat

1:5

8:3

Letter of Aristeas

159

2 Macc

3:24

12:40

4 Macc

17:5

112

Judith

5:5–19

106

4 Ezra

7:97

112

2 Baruch

51:10

112

I N D E X E S

132

Talmud

mSanh

7.7

7.11

mNid

7.3

93, 116

mShab

8.2

mAvot

1.1

2.7

mTa’anit

3.8

101

mSota

9.15

107

tAZ

5.2

tHullin

2.20

103

2.22–23

106

tShab

6.1

108

6–7

104

bBer

105

19a

101

95a

bShab

66b

67a

24, 104

81b

94, 97, 104

82a

97, 104

151b

bErubin

64b

23, 87

bPes

110a

94, 107

111a

112b

108

bYoma

84a

116

bMeg18a

bHag16a

bTa’anit

23a

101

bYeb

122a

bKet

77b

bKid

29b

104

81b

106

bNid

66a

104

bGit

45a

68a

107

78a

107

bSota

22a

bBabaK

117a

104

bBabaB

74b

108

75b

153a

bSanh

17a

I N D E X E S

133

43a

103

65a

22–3

65a-67b

65b

67a

23, 86

67b

22–3, 86, 104,
116

75b

100b

bShev

15b

103

bAZ

27b

106

bHul

105b

104–05

bMeil

17b

40, 106

bArachin

15a

108

jRH

1.2

jShab

6.2

42, 103

6.9

14.4

106, 116

jKid

4.11

jSanh

7.10

104

7.13

22, 93, 108

jErub

10.11

103

jAZ

2.2

116

27b

106

jHag2.2

116

Other Rabbinic Sources

Avot D’Rabbi Natan

EsthRab

1.10

3.12

3.15

4.2

7.13

GenRab

105

79.8

90.2

115

LamRab

1.33

115

5.16

106

LevRab

28.3, 5

105

Pesiq Rab Kah

115

PesRab

107

90b

Pirqe R El

105

ShirRab

7.8

107

Sifre Deut

112

115

Tanhuma Mishpatim

105

I N D E X E S

134

Tanhuma Qedoshim

37.5

70, 114

Tanhuma Vayera

Targum Sheni to Esther

Toledot Jesu

103

See Primary Source Bibliography for edition cited.

Greco-Roman Sources

book

section

pages

Ammianus Marcellinus

31.2.23

108

AnthPal

11.427

Apostolic Con

7:34–51

Apuleius

Apol

1.3

102

25.4

102

25.26

deDeoSoc

30, 34, 35

deDogmaPlat

1.12

105

Meta

2.1

102

Arian

Anab

i.3.2

113

Aristophanes

Clouds

749

116

Plutus

883

Aristotle

Fr. 645 Rose

111

105

NicEth

1177b33

113

Athenaeus

Deip

12.548

15.697

Augustine

CivDei

6.11

9.19

10.9

102

Epist

55.12

Gen ad litt

11.28, 29

Serm

20.3–4

Chaldean Oracles

Fr 122, 123, 138 113
Frs. 137, 138

Cicero

Atticum

1.16.13

113

12.45.2

113

13.28.3

113

14.14.1

113

14.19.3

113

DeDiv

I.41.90–1

DeRep

III.40

ImpPomp

113

InVat

6.14

101

Philippici

110

113

ProCluentio

148

102

CII

241, no. 306

112

CIL

5.2829

113

I N D E X E S

135

Clement of Alexandria

ExMar

108

Paed

1.2–3

1.6

1.12

3.4

103

Protrep

103

102

Strom

1.15

102, 106

2.20

4.15

5.1

110

5.8

40, 106

6.14

7.10

Strom

1.15

CodTheo

9.16.1–2

102

Columella

7.5.17

109

11.3.64

Corpus Hermeticum

4.7

10.7, 23, 25;

11.20–21

115

11.20–21

13.1, 3, 7, 10

Asclepius

24, 37

Council of Laodicea

Canon

29,35–7

Damascius

VitIsid

77.13f.

116

Dio Cassius

45.7.1

54.9.9–10

56.34–56

113

69.11.3

77, 113

75.4–5

113

Dio Chrysostom

Oration

36.4

Diodorus Siculus

Hist

1.1, 94; 2.20

113

Diogenes Laertius

Lives

1.2

1.10

109

Diogenes of Halicarnassus

AntiRom

8.56

108

Eunapius

VitaPhil

466–471

470

475

Euripides

Alc

1003

105

Orestes

1497

Eusebius

3.2

109

5.21 (213B)

104

Geoponica

2.35.3

Geoponica

15.1.6

109

20.6.3

109

Gorgias*

DK 82 B 11.10

I N D E X E S

136

Herodian

4.2

113

Herodotus

Hist

1.132

2.90

114

4.62

114

4.94

7.43

Hesiod

Theog

781

Works

122–4

Hippocrates

Hippolytus

Apostolic

20ff.

107

Constitutions

Ref

4.31

112

10.29–30

115

Homer

iv, 49

108

ix, 50

108

xxiv, 70

108

iii.420

105

Horace

Epistle

2.2.208–9

102

Epodes

5.41–46

116

Ode

1.21–22, 27

102

Sat

1.8

101

Iamblichus

DeMyst

3.31

113

4.590

114

14.960–61

114

Irenaeus

AdHaer

1.4.7

1.13.1–6

1.15.6

2.5

106

2.32.5

4.38

Iulius Paulus

Sent

V.23.17

V.23.14–18

102

John Chysostom

Hom

1.6

inPs

8.3

103

Jud

8.5.935

8.7.937–38

Josephus

Ant

4.213

109

8.46–49

38, 44

14.22

101

18.16–18

20.97

4.480

116

7.180–5

42, 92

7.185

Justin

1 Apol

2 Apol

33, 110

Orat

Trypho

85.3

I N D E X E S

137

Juvenal

Satires

6.542–547

104

6.610–612

116

Lactanius

DivInst

1.15–20

113

Lucan

BelCiv

89, 90

6.413–830

116

6.499ff.

101

6.681–84

102

Lucian

DeorConc

9(533)

113

Pseudoph

Scyth

I.1860

113

Manilius

1.14

113

Marcus Aurelius

Med

1.6

107

Marinus

VitaPro

Martial

9.29.9

116

Maximus of Tyre

8–9(86–110)

105

Mithras Liturgy

476, 487ff., 501,

647

510, 539–40,

570–5

NHC

On the Origin of

II.5.107.3

the World

Oenomaus

213B

105

Olympiodorus*

On the Sacred Arts 2.4.35

2.4.54

111

Origen

1.6,25

106

1.22, 28, 38, 68 13
1.26

1.31

1.68

2.55

3.31, 33, 36

4.32

4.86

5.5

5.6

105

5.41

6.40

23, 106

7.17

23, 109

7.69

8.2, 58

8.43

23, 109

8.62

ComJn

1.37

23, 112

6.36–37

112

ComMatt

10.19

112

23.110

DePr

1.8.1

2.11.5

ExMar

Orphic Tablets

DK 176 B 18

110

I N D E X E S

138

Ovid

Amores

1.14.39–40

102

3.7.27–30

102

ArsAmat

2.99–104

102

MedFac

RemAm

249–52

102

Pausanius

8.9.8

114

PGM

1.5

113

1.54

1.126–130, 216 48
2.46

2.110

107

3.1

113

4.80, 247, 3210 49
4.153–285

4.161, 243,

304, 2289

4.220

4.286–95

4.296–466

4.475–829

114

4.1323

4.3007–86

7.7

7.193–214,

505–28,
540–78

7.532

106

7.795

10.24–35

12.397–400

12.401–7

Philo

de Decal

105

De spec Leg

3.100

102

LegAll

3.44

115

QuesEx

Quod omnis probus

102

SacAbel

Vita

76–79

VitCon

106

Pindar

Olym

8.82

Plato

Alcibiades

1.122A

Charm

156D

113

Crat

397e-398c

Gorgias

513a

116

Legge

933 C-E

Symposium

202d–203a

105

Theaetetus

149C–D

116

Pliny

2.17

102

7.64

92, 102

7.65

102

I N D E X E S

139

8.59

19.23

20.2

24.4

25.26

102

28.4

15, 50

28.6

106

28.70–1

28.82, 94–5

29.1–28, 52–4

29.24–5

30.1, 2, 9

30.5–6,31,82,96 14
30.6–7

102

32.52

109

33.11

Plotinus

Enn

2.9.14

107

Plutarch

Cor

7.7

108

deDefectu

10–21

105

116

deIsis

25–26

105

OrDelphi

116

QuesCon

7.1–2

7.5

RomanQues

Poimandres

26–31

Polybius

His

6.54.2

113

Porphyry

deAbst

1.54

112

2.37–42

35, 105

2.42

Proclus*

InCratyl

74(98)

105

128(75)

105

InPlatRemp

II(255, 271, 345) 105

InTim

III(140)

105

I(208)

ThPl

4.9(193)

Propertius

1.5.4–6

116

3.24.9–10

116

Ps-Clementine

Hom

5.4–7

103

8–9

105

Recognitions

105

Ps-Democritus*

2.3.6

111

Ps-Philo

LiberAntBib

Ptolemy

Astrological

14.4

Inﬂuences

Seneca

HerOet

465–72

102

523–27

102

Medea

787–881

102

Phaedra

420–23

102

I N D E X E S

140

790–792

102

SHR*

1.29,175

1.29, 94, 1755

107

2.18, 63

2.20

2.31

2.182

107

3.29

4.60

5.15

49, 107

Sophocles

Antig

361

Statius

Theb

3.557–59

102

Strabo

Geo

15.1.73

16.2.43

25, 116

Suetonius

Nero

16.2

103

Vesp

114

Syncellus*

Ecloga

23.9–24.12

Chronographia

Tacitus

Hist

5.6

116

Tatian*

Disc

Chap 18

Tertullian

AdScap

107

CultFem

I.2

110

II.10

110

deAnima

DeBapt

112

DeSpec

107

Theocritus

2.15

102

Theophilus of Antioch

Autolyc

2.27

Theophrastus

De Odor

111

Tibullus

2.4.55–60

102

Valerius Flavius

1.735–38

102

6.455–48

102

7.198–99

102

7.325–30

102

Virgil

Ecl

8.95

102

Xenocrates

Epinomis

984ef

105

Xenophanes*

DK 21 B 15–16 54

Zosimos*

About the

3.29.1

111

Philosopher’s Stone

On the Body of

3.28.8

111

Magnesium

On the Letter Omega §7

§§8, 9

110

On the Measurement 3.24.3

111

of Yellowing

On the Sacred and 3.11.1

Divine Art

3.12.1

On the Substances

3.12.7

Round Alum Must 3.20.6

111

be Employed

I N D E X E S

141

Abraham 73; nation of, 64
adjurations 38, 39, 41, 50, 51
afterlife 71
Akiba, Rabbi 22
alchemy 3, 7, 8, 59–69, 96, 98–9;

called the work of women 61;
theology of 67

Alexander the Great 25
Alexandria, Egypt 62
Amorites, Ways of the 23–5
amulet 58
amulets 11, 23, 25, 42, 44, 49, 56–7,

95, 99; adjurations on 50; contents
of, 14, 56

Anaxilaus 59–60, 68
Ancient Near Eastern religions 30
angels 27–53, 57–8, 63, 72–4, 79,

81, 99; Hebrew is language of 63

Annas, J. 32
Antinous 77–8
antipathy. See sympathy and

antipathy

Apuleius 10, 12, 30, 34–5, 70
ascent 67, 71–7, 80–3
Asherah, consort of Yahweh 28
Asmodeaus, king of demons 44–5
astrology 13–15, 38, 44
Augustine 10, 13, 25, 27, 35
Augustus 1, 68, 76–7

balneum Mariae 65
baptism 46, 79
Barton, T. 60
Blau, L. 4, 5
Boddy, J. 36, 46
body: control of 37, 38; destruction of

to allow ascent 76; negative
attitude towards 37; parts, 51

Boyarin, D. 87
Brown, P. 2, 87
burial 3, 45, 71, 74–5, 78; pseudo 78

Canaanite religion 21, 88
cannibalism 3, 97
cause and effect 8, 58
Celsus 18–19, 22, 25, 27
charismatic individual. See holy man
Chrysostom, John 10, 25
Cicero 10, 75–7
Clement of Alexandria 18, 40, 48, 70,

75, 79, 83, 84

Constantine the Great 11, 23
Corpus Hermeticum 54, 82, 83, 85
cross-cultural logic 8
cures 13–16, 95, 97

daimons 6, 17, 19, 23, 25, 27–46,

51–4, 58, 75, 94, 96; palm trees
home to 96; rituals to thwart 35

deiﬁcation 70–85, 98–9; drowning as

a form of 78

Democritus 13, 49, 59–60, 62, 64–5,

67, 93

Dio Cassius 75, 77
Diogenes Laertius 9
divinization. See deiﬁcation
doctors 11, 15–16, 65, 97

Egypt 13, 33, 42, 45, 100; source of

alchemy 62, 68; source of magic
12–13

Egyptian religion 3, 21, 42, 57, 100

The First Book of

3.51.3

110

the Final
Reckoning

The Four Bodies

3.19.3

The True Book of

3.42.1

Sophe

See Primary Source Bibliography

GENERAL INDEX

I N D E X E S

142

I N D E X E S

143

Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi 22
Empedocles 13, 71
Essenes 77
Eucharist 55, 84; as magic 3
Euripides 9
exorcism 6, 27–46, 56, 98
exorcist 38, 43–6

fakirs 9
Faraone, C. 51–2
Forbes, R. 61, 64
Frazer, J. 4–5, 55

Garrett, S. 5
goetia 9
Goldin, J. 4, 24
Gorgias 9
Greek Magical Papyri 41–2, 48,

Hadrian 77
heavenly praise 28, 52
Hebrew language 26
Hercules 76
heresy 7, 17, 99
Hermes 42, 82–3
Herodian 75
Herodotus 9, 13, 77
holy man 31, 70
Homer 14, 32–3, 71
Honi the Circle Drawer 4–5, 48
Hopkins A. J., 64
Horace 1
Hypatia 95–6

Idel, M. 84
Ilan, T. 62, 87, 98
immortality 7, 49, 71, 74, 77, 79–82,

Ino-leukothea cult 80
Irenaeus 17–19, 84
Iulius Paulus 10

Jacob 83
Jesus 3, 17, 23, 38–9, 41, 43, 46, 55,

68, 70, 78–79

Jews: as esoteric specialists 25; as

magicians 1, 45

Johanan, Rabbi 24
Josephus 33, 39, 42, 44, 70, 77, 92

Judah, Rabbi 94
Julius Caesar 75, 77
Justin Martyr 79

Keyser, P. 62

Lewy, H. 23
liturgy 49, 81–2
love-rites 6, 47–58, 89, 98
Lucan 90
Lucian 38

mageia 5, 6, 9–11, 18
magi 2, 9, 10, 12, 13–16, 18, 40, 48,

88, 97, 98

magic: as a capital offense 11, 18, 21;

as effective action 3, 19; as
entertainment 2; as fraud 3, 13,
15–16, 18, 26, 97; Catholic
practices as 4; in law codes 11–12,
97; late 19th and early 20th
century deﬁnitions of 3, 4, 55, 84;
modern deﬁnitions of 3, 5, 46, 48,
97; negative connotation of 1;
plasticity of term 97; self-
classiﬁcation as 5; work of daimons
17–19

magicians 1–3, 6–7, 10, 12–13,

17–18, 21, 25, 48, 68, 70, 84, 97,
99; Honi the Circle Drawer as 5;
Jesus as 3, 17

magos 5, 9, 10, 12
Maria the Jewess 59–69, 96, 98
Marsi: as snake-charmers 13
medicine 13, 15–16, 32, 60
men of deed 5, 99
menstruation 90–3, 96; special powers

of menstrual blood 92–3

midwifery 95
Momigliano, A. 25
monotheism 6, 7, 28, 30, 71, 100
Moses 3, 21, 62, 69, 74–5, 83

Nag Hammadi 44
Nahman, daughters of Rabbi 91
names: angel 29, 47, 49, 56, 81;

daimon 40; divine 26, 39–40, 43,
45, 52, 81; effective use of 39, 81

necromancy 13, 88
Nehunya, Rabbi, 81, 82

Neusner, J. 16, 99
Nilsson, M. 30–1, 59–60, 69
Noah, 48
Nock, A. D. 50, 71

Olympiodorus 63
Origen 13, 18–20, 22–3, 44, 53,

68–9, 83

Ovid 13

Paul the Apostle 38–9
Persia 33
Persian priest. See magos
Persian religion 9, 32, 88, 97
Philo 10, 44, 74, 75, 79, 83
phylacteries 25, 41, 56; as magic 3
Pibechus rite 42–3, 45
Plato 11, 13, 32–3, 80; Platonic forms

Pliny 13–17, 25, 50, 59–60, 90, 92,

Plutarch 33–4, 40, 74, 92
polytheism 71, 100
Porphyry 35
possession 36–46
potions 1, 12, 87
Prince of the Sea 53
Priscillian 1, 18
Proclus 10, 34, 78, 82
projection, Freudian 86
prostitution 87
purity 64, 91–3, 96
Pythagoras 13, 18, 49

Queen of Heaven 94
Quirinus 75
Qumran 29, 37, 56, 72–4

rabbis: methods of argumentation 90
Raziel, Angel 29, 48
relativism 8
ritual: psychological basis for 8
Romulus 76

Sabbath, the 17, 21–2, 42, 55, 57,

72–3, 95

Sacred Arts 7, 60–7. See also alchemy
sacriﬁce 1, 15, 31, 45, 53, 76, 98;

alchemy as modiﬁed 68; animal
53; Biblical 45; daimons feed on

31; ﬁre 9, 16; Hindu,55; human 1,
3, 89

Sanhedrin 23–4, 90–1
Satan 18
Saul 88–90
Schmidt B., 13
sexual intercourse 1, 29, 37, 47, 94
sexuality 87
Simeon ben Shetah 94
Smith, J. Z. 30, 53, 69, 83
Smith, M. 44, 73, 84
Socrates 34, 79
Solomon 39, 44, 63; seal of, 41, 43–5
sons of God 28, 29, 33, 84
Sosipatra 96
speech-act theory. See words:contexts

of use

statues 47, 54–7, 75; and deiﬁcation

75, 78; divinity and 84; idolatry
and 54, 57; of gods 54

Strabo 25, 77
Sulla 12
sympathy and antipathy 15, 59, 68

Tatian 19
Taylor, F. 64–66
Theophilus of Antioch 79
Thessaly 89; known for witches 13
Thrace 13, 33, 77
tomb 51, 53–4, 61, 74–6
Twelve Tables 11

veneﬁcium. See potions
voodoo 4, 9, 53, 55

warlocks 3
witch 1–3, 8, 13, 23, 86, 88–90,

94–6, 98; of Endor, 88

witchcraft 2, 3, 23, 86–96
women: alchemy the work of. See

alchemy:called the work of women;
chthonic power of 93–4;
competitors of rabbis 61, 99;
Jewish, taught alchemy by angels,
63; menstruating. See
menstruation; more likely to
practice magic 2, 7, 23; more
likely to practice witchcraft 86–96

words: contexts of use 39, 40, 56
worship 10, 35, 54, 71, 76, 94

I N D E X E S

144

Xanthus 9
Xenocrates 33

Yahweh 21
Yohanan, Rabbi 95

Zar religion (African) 36
Zosimos 61–7, 98

I N D E X E S

145

Document Outline

Book Cover
Title
Contents
Preface
List of abbreviations
Introduction
Greco-Roman, Christian and Jewish concepts of ~magic~
Daimons and angels and the world of exorcism
Ancient rites for gaining lovers
Using natural forces for divine goals: Maria the Jewess and early alchemy
Divine power, human hands: becoming gods in the first centuries
~Even the decent women practice witchcraft~: magic and gender in late antiquity
Concluding note: the legacy of the first centuries
Notes
Bibliography
Indexes

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Document Outline